Tag: Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Critics’ Picks Competition

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The Brothers Kitaura
(Kitaurakyodai)

Director – Masaki Tsujino – 2024 – Japan – 94m

***1/2

A 40-year-old living at home accidentally kills his father, then enlists the help of his brother to dispose of the body – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Morning. 40-year-old Sato wakes up, surrounded by bagged-up piles of manga, used food packaging and drink cans. The used food packaging squelches as he stretches into it. He is a slob. Meanwhile, his better-dressed, retired and widowed art teacher father is out teaching watercolour painting to a lady of a similar age to himself. They sit on the bank overlooking a picturesque river scene and seem to be enjoying both the act of painting and each other’s company.

Sato finds the note his father left him, and orders takeaway food to feed himself accordingly. Then, to satisfy more carnal appetites, he also orders a call-girl from Bang Club Tokyo, who arrives as promised in a matter of minutes, sitting for a relaxing smoke (which we see) before servicing her client (which we don’t).

The father isn’t just enjoying his lady student’s company. He appears to be teaching her and her alone for a number of consecutive days, and would like to formalise the relationship into something more.… Read the rest

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Johatsu
(Johatsu)

Directors – Lina Lužytė, Nerijus Milerius – 2024 – Lithuania – 83m

***

A woman who checks bodies entering a morgue investigates one that she is convinced has been registered under a false name – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

The concept of Johatsu or ‘vanished people’ – which is never explained here, merely name-checked in the title – originated in Japan, where it refers to people who vanish from their everyday lives without a trace. One way to achieve that goal would be to fake your own death, which is exactly what Lina (Zygimante Elena Jakstaite) believes she has stumbled upon someone doing as this opens.

Lina works as an orderly in a morgue. When the fresh corpse of a man supposedly blown up in an explosion on a ship is identified as her husband by his widow, Lina becomes convinced that the woman is lying, and that the body is that of someone else entirely. Which begs the question, what happened to the real husband?

First off, Lina takes it upon herself to visit and question the supposed dead man’s wife. Talking to the woman, she discovers that before the body turned up, the husband had already been ‘missing’ for around three years.… Read the rest

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Moor
(Mavr)

Director – Adilkhan Yerzhanov – 2024 – Kazakhstan, France – 83m

***

A mercenary known by the codename ‘Moor’ returns from the war to the big city to rescue his younger brother’s wife and son from her husband’s debts – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Found by the authorities, who apprehend him by a perimeter fence and remove his bag of home-made weaponry which includes a wooden bow and arrows and a knife carved from bone, which he will get back and make use of later in the plot, Moor is processed alongside wounded and traumatised veterans. He speaks few words and is in complete control of his faculties. The chief of police, who talks in a confident, jokey manner and insists on addressing him as Bro, feels more like a gangster than a cop, wearing a snakeskin jacket not unlike the hero of Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990) and often accompanied by a small entourage who read as gangsters rather than cops, even though the group occasionally expands to contain officers with the word POLICE on the back of their jackets.

He explains that Moor’s younger brother Houdini has disappeared, leaving behind him not only a mountain of debt but also a wife and small son.… Read the rest

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Fishgirl
(Alucina)

Fishgirl - Critics' Picks Special Mention

Director – Javier Cutrona – 2024 – Ecuador – 105m

**

Enter the surreal world of a young woman beset by bizarre visions who believes herself followed and protected by a giant fish – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Fairly early on, in a tender, conversational, post-coital scene, her boyfriend José (Lucas Ortiz) draws an additional face on the side of that of Camila (Jessica Barahona). Visually this suggests Cubism, in which a subject’s faces would be painted from different angles simultaneously, but the dialogue between the two swiftly moves on to the subject of a god with two faces possessing the ability to look into the past and the future. (This sounds like the Roman god Janus, but if anyone name-checked him here, I must have missed it.).

The motif is echoed later when her landlord Edmundo (Pablo Aguirre), who runs (owns?) the hotel where she rents a room, is attending to the doll’s house of their rooms and maquettes of all the hotel’s residents he has made. For the maquette of Camila, he grafts an extra face onto the side of hers so that she has two. And towards the end, a shot of Camila cinematographically superimposes a second face on her, a very neat visual trick.… Read the rest

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Hani
(Hani)

Director – Hou Dasheng – 2024 – Canada – 73m

*

In a remote, Southern Chinese mountain village, a 14-year-old needs the money for the dowry to buy his 12-year-old sweetheart as a wife – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Credited on the Festival’s website as a Canadian production in the Burmese and Chinese languages, this is a Chinese-made film not sanctioned by the Chinese authorities dealing with subject matter which the filmmakers fear would not be passed by the Chinese censor. The caption review suggests that a number of the film’s cast and crew have used pseudonyms to avoid prosecution. The narrative takes place in the mountainous, Southern region of China close to the border with Myanmar, where people are known by their Burmese names, but occasionally refer to other people by their Chinese names. You get the feeling that this area of China has been largely forgotten by the distant Beijing authorities.

The central characters are young teenagers or pre-teenagers, Hani (14; Gao Xiaokang) and his friend Apao (Qian Long), who seems to be frequently seeking advice from others on his mobile phone, and Hani’s longtime sweetheart Pushiha (12; Pu Juan).… Read the rest

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Tallinn Critics’ Picks selection: so good it’s almost impossible to beat

Nobody Likes Me

Goldfinger said: “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago. ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.'” – Jeremy Clarke anticipates his third visit to Tallinn to cover the third year of its Critics’ Picks strand

When you see a film, or visit a film festival, you inevitably have expectations. The bar is at a certain level. The first time I went to POFF, I didn’t really know what to expect, except that our editor Victor Fraga spoke highly of it, which obviously boded well. Once there, I found the festival extremely friendly, perhaps due to its size (it’s the smallest of the A-list festivals), and a place where filmmakers, critics and other industry types happily mingle (that doesn’t happen in the larger festivals, I understand, and it doesn’t happen at most festivals I’ve had the pleasure of attending. Yet, it has happened in Tallinn on the two occasions I’ve visited, which is a real joy. Being a natural worrier, I fear that Tallinn may abandon this virtue at some point. Yet, so far, it hasn’t, and long may it continue in that vein).

Back to the level of the bar. The first year I went, 2022, the Critics’ Picks films were of a good standard overall – there was one I disliked and a couple that I thought particularly excellent (Dito Tsintsadze’s Roxy and Çigdem Sezgin’s Suna).… Read the rest

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The Old Man
and the Land

Director – Nicholas Parish – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 100m

*****

As he works on the land, an aging farmer hears his two adult children argue about the future of the family farm – plays UK cinemas from Friday, September 20th 2024, with previews from Monday, September 16th following its premiere in the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, where it was the best film out of a superb lot

Movies. You think everything’s been done, then along comes something you’ve never seen before. Or, in this case, seen or heard before.

The Old Man in question is an English farmer (Roger Marten) whose family have worked the land for generations. He’s getting on in years, so won’t be around forever. His wife died a while ago, so he’s now running the farm on his own. He has two children who have long since grown up and left home: a son (voice: Rory Kinnear) and a daughter (voice: Emily Beecham), and the big question is, when he dies, will they take over – or will they get rid of the farm?

In recent years, the UK has produced a number of rural movies that stand in stark contrast to the urban- (often London-) based films produced.… Read the rest

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The Picks that spoiled our film critic!

Tallinn viewed from the Nordic Hotel Forum.

Jeremy Clarke returns to the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in order to cover the Critics’ Picks section (which is now on its second year); he encounters what’s probably the strongest section of the event

Some people have a fear of flying. I don’t, but dislike of all the bureaucratic paraphernalia that surrounds airports. Not to mention London’s transport system, which is good most of the time, but not so much when it goes wrong. Coming home from the Festival last year, I got caught up in a tube strike. That didn’t happen this year. Indeed, the travel to and from the airport worked better for a number of reasons.

One was that the Festival’s hospitality team were kind enough to book my flights to and from Heathrow. This meant I could use the Elizabeth Line to travel to and from the airport. I currently live on the Victoria Line, which connects directly with three major rail terminals (Kings Cross, Euston, Victoria) but not the Elizabeth Line. The Elizabeth was all a bit too new last year, but Londoners who frequently travel into the centre of town as I do have got rather more used to it, and the Oxford Circus (Victoria Line) to Bond Street (Central Line) to Heathrow (Elizabeth Line) is reasonably easy to navigate.… Read the rest

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Mrs.

Director – Arati Kadev – 2023 – India – Cert. none – 111m

****

After getting married, a woman is expected to work cheerfully from dawn to dusk, waiting on the menfolk of the house hand and foot – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This is the Hindi remake of Malaysian film The Great Indian Kitchen (Jeo Baby, 2021).

It starts off cheerfully enough with a big song and dance routine with lots of percussion instruments in which the heroine Richa (Sanya Malhotra), who we later learn is a keen amateur choreographer, shows off various Bollywood dance moves in sync with her fellow dancers. You wouldn’t know it from the cleverly constructed trailer, but there are surprisingly few song and dance routines overall for a Bollywood production – the only two complete numbers take place right at the start and right at the end, with the film’s running length at just under two hours a lot shorter than your average, three hour, Bollywood epic which tends to interrupt the action for a song every five minutes. In that sense, the whole thing feels surprisingly Western.

In another sense, the first hour or so doesn’t feel Western at all.… Read the rest

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Fez Summer ’55
(” 55″ خمسة وخمسين)

Director – Abdelhai Laraki – 2023 – Morocco – Cert. none – 114m

****

An 11-year-old boy navigates the rooftops of a Moroccan city while insurgents plot the overthrow of French colonialists in private courtyards and sometimes confront the occupying police in the streets – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

The old medina of Moroccan city Fez, a lattice of narrow streets where there is room for no more than pedestrian traffic. Or, to 11-year-old boy Kamal (Ayman Driwi), a network of rooftops and walkways allowing him to go anywhere. His freedom on the top of the city stands in sharp contrast to the country’s political reality: occupied by France, with their police patrolling the streets. The locals either keep their heads down or agitate for the return of their exiled ruler, Sultan Mohammed V.

The story is very much told from Kamal’s point of view. He is at once possessed of a child’s enthusiasm for life and from his rooftop vantage point able to see things unseen by most of the narrative’s adults most of the time. Yet, he is hampered by his immaturity and lack of understanding of what’s really going on.… Read the rest