Health issues prevent Jeremy Clarke from attending the Critics’ Picks at the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, but he manages to watch the films anyway.
2025 has been a strange year for me personally, not least because of my ongoing fight against cancer. Which, I am happy to report, I appear to be winning. To cut a very long story short, for the previous three years I’ve had the great privilege and joy of attending PÖFF, the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival and covering, since its inception in 2022, the Festival’s Critics’ Picks Competition for Dmovies.org. This year, however, I found myself on a five day course of radiotherapy on dates immediately before the Festival. One of the things you learn very quickly when having treatment for cancer is that everybody is different – every body is different – and reactions and side effects can vary enormously from person to person.
The hospital warned me of possible side effects which might kick in anything up to a month after the treatment, and also that I would be very unwise to delay the radiotherapy. That effectively stopped me from leaving the UK around the time of the Festival this year. As it happens, there were no obvious side effects for the first month, when I visited my doctor for a post-treatment face-to-face meeting, only for them to kick in the day after. Radiotherapy can cause a sort of reverse sunburn – instead of the sun burning your body from the outside, the radiation to which the target part of your body has been subjected can burn your body from the inside, which can be pretty nasty, so you have to rub special emollient cream on the affected area. In my case, this has been mercifully slight, but it IS present, even if it did kick in quite some time after I was warned it would.
DMovies helpfully had fellow writer Victoria Luxford cover the Critics’ Picks strand for me this year, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it, but the selections on the previous year were so good, I thought I’d try and watch as much of the Critics’ Picks selection as I could online, with the proviso that I’d just go one film at a time and if it became too much as the side-effects kicked in, I could simply stop. This would not so easy if one were actually abroad in Estonia at the Festival without all the potential backup of the UK’s NHS (National Health Service) if things went horribly wrong, but much more do-able staying in the UK.
The Festival has a very user-friendly, online viewing platform, which meant it was possible to watch films from the UK. Of course, films are meant to be seen on the big screen, and in addition to the format, size and superior sound, you miss all the excitement of seeing the films at a festival, especially when some of the filmmakers turn up for Q&A sessions. Not to mention the overall Festival buzz. Yet even if it’s not ideal, and you miss the experience of being there, this way you can at least see the films.
I approached the Critics’ Picks movies with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Anticipation because the previous three years’ programmes had been consistently excellent; dread because – well, what if this year’s selection wasn’t so good? 2023, in particular, was outstanding. Would there be anything that would take my breath away as much as The Old Man and the Land (Nicholas Parish 2023), the very last film I saw that year? Or I, the Song (Dechen Roder, 2024)? Or Nobody Likes Me (Petr Kazda, Tomáš Weinreb, 2024)? Or Roxy (Dito Tsintsadze, 2022)? Or Suna (Çigdem Sezgin, 2022)?
In one way, this year’s programme reminded me of my 2023 experience. The first film was a five star film. And the second. And the third and the fourth. At this point, I was starting to have doubts. Was I being too lenient? Was I giving out five star ratings too easily? Was the quality on the remaining films going to plummet? In the end, there were a couple of terrific films I knocked down to four and a half stars, a Taiwan’s juvenile care home drama That Burning House (Tsai Yin-chuan, 2025), because in places it was really difficult to follow who was who, and Canadian drama about disabled people and sex Invisibles (Junna Chif, 2025), because it ran out of (ahem) steam towards the end. And one that I liked but because I felt it lacked focus, I couldn’t give more than four stars to France and Belgium’s Nino in Paradise (Laurent Micheli, 2025). However, the rest consistently came in at five stars.
Estonia’s Mo Papa (Eeva Mägi, 2025) is a likeable, freewheeling character study relying heavily on improvisation, a cocktail that usually produces mediocre or dire results but happily on this occasion broke the mould to result in something very special. The theme of someone finding their way in the world continued with Lithuania’s China Sea (Jurgis Matulevičius, 2025), one of two films to feature Oriental immigrants, the other being Argentina’s terrific part-drama, part-cops and robbers thriller Street Wanderers (Juan Martin Hsu, 2025) set in Mendoza’s immigrant community. The film that I thought for a while was going to be my favourite this year was another, similarly low-life Argentinian production, A Summer’s Tale (Matías Szulanski, 2025), a drama shot on the streets of Buenos Aires about a debt collector with a serious heart problem.
Where the protagonist of China Sea was a professional kickboxer, the young boy at the centre of Tunisia’s Round 13 (Mohamed Ali Nahdi, 2025) has picked up a love of boxing from his former, professional boxer father. However, it turns out not to be a boxing movie but a surprisingly compelling tale about the boy’s fight against cancer. Mexico’s very different The Silent Virgin (Xavi Sala, 2025) is a character study of a woman coming to terms with her lesbian identity of which her mother disapproves, and for its final half hour switches into a study of a mother worthy of Hitchcock.
And yet, while the standard was undeniably high, as I worked my way though the titles in the Festival’s online viewing library nothing quite matched some of the very best films I’ve seen in in the Critics’ Picks the previous three years. There was one title left which go left until last because it wasn’t available in the library: in the end, I was able to arrange a screening via a combination of the Festival’s press office and the film’s producer: and I’m very glad I did, because as in 2023, where The Old Man and the Land was the very last film to screen and, for me, far and away the best film in an outstanding programme, so this year that very last film Oh, What Happy Days! (Homayoun Ghanizadeh, 2025) turned out, for me, to be the best thing in this year’s programme, and up there with the best films I’ve seen at Tallinn over the last three years.
I deliberately resisted looking at which films had won prizes until I’d seen them. I don’t think there’s a film in this year’s Critics’ Picks that wouldn’t have been a deserving winner: the jury had their work cut out. In the event, they went for China Sea for Best Film and A Summer’s Tale for Best Director, with special mentions for Mo Papa and Oh, What Happy Days! Hard to disagree with any of those choices, although this year’s Critics Picks was such a strong selection that they could have picked any of the other films and I’d have been equally happy about it.
The Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival runs in cinemas from Friday, November 7th to Sunday, November 23rd 2025
Critics’ Picks mashup trailer:
Festival teaser trailer: