Go East: borders and paradoxes of identity at Tallinn Black Nights’ KinoFF spinoff, 2019 first published by Sight & Sound Far from Tallinn: Narva on Estonia’s margins In the city of Narva, in Estonia’s extreme east right on the border with Russia, there is a statue of Lenin. It is a throwback to the period…
Looted first published by EyeforFilm for its World Première at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2019 Rene Pannevis’ feature debut begins with one variety of wake and ends with another. The first is the kind that trails behind a ship, seen from above as we hear Oswald (Tom Fisher) narrating how he was at sea…
A Family first published by EyeforFilm at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2019 To watch Jayden Stevens’ feature debut, you would never know where the director comes from. For like Ariel Kleiman’s Partisan (2015) and Steven Kastrissios’ Bloodlands (2017), A Family is an Australian film unfolding in Eastern Europe – in this case Ukraine, with…
Vagoneros (Marioneta) first published by EyeforFilm at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2019 A celebrated actor and director in Cuba, Ernesto (Rafael Ernesto Hernández) finds himself down and out in Mexico city, when a chance encounter with mendicant Belén (Fátima Molina) leads him to her gangland boss Torrico (Juan Manuel Bernal). Torrico hires Ernesto to…
Saul At Night first published by EyeforFilm at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2019 There is in the background of Cory Santilli’s feature debut (written by Daniel Miska) a science-fiction premise explaining why it is that protagonist Saul (Kentucker Audley) keeps a strictly calibrated waking schedule that is different from everyone else’s – including that…
Just 6.5 (Metri Shesh Va Nim) first published by EyeforFilm at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2019 Just 6.5 (Metri Shesh Va Nim) is a film of crowds. You can see it in the junkyard slum that police raid near the beginning of the film, as they round up a makeshift suburb’s worth of packed-in…
Mater first published by EyeforFilm at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2019 “I’m not leaving this house. Never.” The speaker is Anka (Neva Rosic), a crafty, cancerous, cantankerous old widow who maybe knows, maybe does not, that her adult daughter Jasna (Daria Lorenci) has come all the way from her own home in Berlin to…