Tag: PÖFF

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Oh, What Happy Days!
(Ah Che Roozhayeh Khoshi Bood)

Director – Homayoun Ghanizadeh – 2025 – Iran, USA, France, Canada – 107m

*****

On a video phone network, a woman is caught between her well-off family and their former servant’s wronged son – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Facing us, photographed in black and white, an old man hangs up, revealed by his offline screen to be Mr. Farrokhi (Ali Nassirian) in Los Angeles, as a woman rails to camera, hurling obscenities at him as at the viewer. Her screen enlarges as it moves to centre screen. He and she, like the other characters who appear in this drama, is wearing what looks like a prison uniform with a designation tab above the right breast.

As the piece proceeds, you start to get a handle on the ground rules: this is a film that owes much to communications technologies like Zoom. Characters only ever appear here within a Zoom type box in black and white, slowly morphing into colour for moments when they relax or are less guarded and more openly themselves. Sometimes there is only a single box with its one character filling the screen; this shifts to two, three – or, in two rows, four or five – boxes side by side.… Read the rest

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Invisibles
(Invisibles)

Director – Junna Chif – 2025 – Canada – 94m

****1/2

A sex worker turned exotic dancer starts providing sexual services to disabled people – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

“Blow jobs are real jobs – and real jobs suck” reads a slogan held by three boisterous young women on a protest march. In a nightclub, we watch one of them perform a burlesque striptease to rapturous applause from the audience, seated in male and female blocks. ‘Ella’ (Nadia Essadiqi from Incendies, Denis Villeneueve, 2010) later gets an email from the disabled brother of a friend stating he is now “ready for full sexual intercourse”.

She decides to meet the challenge, so the sender turns up in a van with his carer Marco (Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles) who hoists him onto the bed, then departs for an hour leaving a contact number. Floyd (Floyd Lapierre-Poupart) can’t move much and has club hands and feet, and their initial encounter proves less than successful, resulting in his premature ejaculation. You sense that the whole exercise is way outside both their comfort zones. In the tense exchange that follows with Marco, he emphasises that the correct term is “people with a disability, Miss” and she retorts with, “sex workers, Sir.”… Read the rest

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That Burning House
(Shi Le Yuan,
火宅之犬)

Director – Tsai Yin-chuan – 2025 – Taiwan – 133m

****1/2

Teachers In a care home attempt to break the cycle of violence among their charges – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This is one of those films that takes place in several different times in the characters lives, including when they are children, teenagers and adults. That means that you need more than one actor to play each character at different times in their lives, and if you’re going to attempt that, you’d better get your casting right, so that when you see the second actor playing an older or younger version of the character, you instantly recognise that character.

I wanted to rate this compelling film as five stars, but it has severe problems in this area – it’s really hard working out which character is which in the various different times in which events take place. Studying the end credits helped somewhat in this regard, but that information really ought to be expressed more clearly within the film narrative itself. (To see an example of a film that tackles this multiple character casting brilliantly, see Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2018).… Read the rest

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Street Wanderers
(Los Caminantes
de la Calle)

Director – Juan Martin Hsu – 2025 – Argentina, Peru – 90m

*****

Argentinian cops and robbers procedural is set largely in the world of Mendoza’s immigrant Chinese community – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

2010. Mendoza, Argentina. The family-run, Chinese restaurant of Dageng (Kon Yam Pin) receives telephone threats for protection money. When they don’t pay up within 24 hours, a motorbike with two riders pulls up on at their door which opens onto the main street and fires four shots. So Dageng’s son (Willy Kon Chin Yi) delivers a rucksack containing $50 000 to the gang. But later, the riders complain there was only $30 000 and demand another $20 000.

Lots of similarly threatening phone calls overlap on the soundtrack as we see numerous yellow cables plugged into a telecoms hub, recalling similar motifs in movies as diverse as Three Colours Red (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994) and Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953).

The prosecutor’s office is monitoring phone calls, but faces challenges. One such is that the calls are in Cantonese so require an interpreter to turn them into intelligible Spanish. Another is illustrated when the current interpreter quits, terrified what might happen to her family if word about the nature of her work gets out.… Read the rest

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The Silent Virgin
(La Virgen Silenciosa)

Director – Xavi Sala – 2025 – Mexico – 127m

*****

A legal secretary frustrated in her job embarks on a relationship with another woman, but her possessive mother does not approve – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This certainly knows how to grab your attention at the start. An icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) hangs on the wall. On the bed, a grown woman pleasures herself until… The earth moves! Everything is shaking, and she quickly recovers her composure as her middle-aged mother runs in to get her out of the house as the earthquake alarm goes off.

After, they eat at the meal table, and her mother (Mercedes Hernández from New Order, Michel Franco, 2020) asks Vale (“Va-lay”; Zamira Franco also from New Order), who she’ll later address as Valeria, to pick up prescriptions while she’s out and makes sure she doesn’t forget her packed lunch. Then it’s train, bus and the walk past colourful stalls to work. Vale’s office with about half a dozen or so people seems to be piled high with paperwork. They are dealing with the cases of people being arrested. One man being interviewed claims that one of them is lying.… Read the rest

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Nino in Paradise
(Nino Dans la Nuit)

Director – Laurent Micheli – 2025 – Belgium, France – 117m

****

A young man, his girlfriend and his two mates navigate an urban existence filled with crap jobs during the day and drug-fuelled partying during the night – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This opens with a combination of slow, ominous music (which you might describe as a deep, absorbing blue) being undercut by frame grabbed moving images featuring green, yellow, red, and black – but not blue – of people partying, girls snorting coke and popping pills.

And then the voiceover, the potential sign that someone should be writing a novel or perhaps poetry rather than making a movie. “Paradis. People always ask me, is that your real name?” And straight into an interview for the Foreign Legion. This might have proved a useful escape route for protagonist Nino Paradis (Oscar Högström), but a medical test (“Toilet. Piss.”) soon puts paid to that, revealing as it does high levels of drugs in his system.

They pay his train fare back to Paris. “In Paris, you can’t stop. I walked. I walked ’til I dropped.” He talks about a succession of dead end jobs.… Read the rest

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A Summer Tale
(Cuento de Verano)

Director – Matías Szulanski – 2025 – Argentina – 78m

*****

A moneylender’s difficulties getting money owed back from clients on time cause his heart to play up – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

It’s a lovely Summer day. Jorge (Fabián Arenillas) is out on the street, getting up again, gathering his briefcase. What happened? A blackout? A heart attack? 

The camera follows him from behind as he enters a modern building. In the hairdresser’s, the owner asks him to come back later as he’s busy with a client. A cigarette on the go, stopping for a glass of Coke, he makes his next call. When the door opens, it’s the client’s son, who turns out not to have nearly enough money to make a significant payment. 

He returns to the hairdresser’s, where one of the customers heaps abuse on him. If what he had at the start was a heart attack, it’s not hard to see why. Jorge leads a highly stressful life. 

Wherever he goes, he seems to want to extract money from people. A phone call to Diana (Tamara Leschner) leads to a quick meeting where he picks up $124 000 and gives her an invoice.… Read the rest

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Round 13
(13ème Round)

Director – Mohamed Ali Nahdi – 2025 – Tunisia, Cyprus, Qatar, Saudi Arabia – 85m

*****

A young boy is diagnosed with a tumour in his arm, and his parents must guide him through his ensuing medical treatment – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

My third Critics’ Picks entry is another five star movie. Which is great, but once again, I wonder, for how many more films can this last? What IS true is that this is not another ‘urban unease and finding your way in the world’ movie like China Sea (Jurgis Matulevičius. 2025) or Mo Papa (Eeva Mägi, 2025), it’s something altogether different.

Sabri (Hedi Ben Jabouria) is a very ordinary eight-year-old boy who likes boxing. We first meet him out with his dad in the cinema where the pair are watching a black and white movie about boxing. They return home where Sabri looks at his dad’s old photos of his days as a boxer in Rome.

They are interrupted by Sabri’s mum Semia whose name curiously isn’t spoken until about ten minutes before the end of the movie (Afef Ben Mahmoud) and who wants to know why she can never reach Kamel (Helmi Drid), the boy’s dad, on the phone.… Read the rest

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China Sea
(Kinų Jūra)

Director – Jurgis Matulevičius – 2025 – Lithuania, Taiwan, Poland, Czechia – 96m

*****

A former champion kickboxer whose career has been destroyed by his poor anger management attempts to find direction in life – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

World champion kickboxer Osvald Gurevicious (Marius Rapsys) has it all, but unfortunately is a bit too full of himself, accidentally clobbering a woman who is standing in the wrong place during a bar room brawl. We see him at the height of his success, playing an opponent in a tournament in Japan, but we never see the incident which destroys his career. Instead, he goes on TV back in Lithuania explaining that it was all a terrible accident which he regrets, but sadly that doesn’t seem to cut any ice.

Discussing the situation with his coach (Marius Misiūnas), he resolves to make the best of the situation by opening his own gym; his coach, however, isn’t sure that Osvald has what it takes and suggests he work at the gym as an assistant to see if he has a feel for coaching. Among Osvald’s new kickboxing charges is the promising Angelika (Samantha Drilingate), who he helps to learn how to defend herself in the ring when she comes in one day with a massive torso bruise from a bar fight that got out of hand.… Read the rest

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Mo Papa
(Mo Papa)

Director – Eeva Mägi – 2025 – Estonia – 88m

*****

A young ex-con imprisoned as a teenager for killing his younger brother tries to make his way in present-day Tallinn – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

I am wary of unscripted feature films. There is a reason why most narrative movies are made working from scripts; actors have lines to speak, to help them get a handle on their characters. Technicians have an idea of what they are realising on the screen or the soundtrack for a director. Without a script, most attempts at making a film are liable to founder. And quite probably result in an indulgent, unwatchable movie.

Mo Papa, according to the Festival’s blurb, was unscripted. On the one hand, I fear the worst. On the other, after three years of watching Critics’ Picks at Tallinn, I know the standard to be generally high, and duff films are happily all too rare. Would Mo Papa turn out to be one of those rare blips?

It’s also an Estonian movie, and because this is an Estonian festival, in a sense that ups the ante. So I’m really hoping it’s going to be good.… Read the rest