Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival – PÖFF

For the past four years I’ve been working at the Black Nights film festival, Pöff, in Tallinn, Estonia in November.  The first year I was part of a jury awarding funding to films in development for young audiences and hosted a live / online panel with a host of filmmakers and film people including Ninja Thyberg. 

The second year I was part of the Just Film Jury alongside Lotte Bronshoff from Holland and Jaak Kilmi from Estonia , where we awarded our special prize to Six Weeks by Noémi Veronika Szakonyi from Hungary.  It tells the story of a high achieving sporting teenager who falls pregnant.  It is a very profound and touching film that really spoke to all of us on the jury. 
We were particularly impressed by all of the films we saw emerging from Hungary as part of the festival, it’s such an exciting scene full of vital stories that are demanding to be told. 

My third visit to Tallinn saw me hosting two industry panels about young people’s cinema for Just Film.
The Deepness of Filmmaking: Do Modern Day Kids Question What’s Behind the Film and Brilliant Films That Find No Audience – From the Distributor’s Persepective. The second of these panels opened up the world of film distribution to me and introduced me to some truly fascinating takes on the economics of cinema and how personal so much of the industry is at such a high level.

In my fourth visit I hosted two panels which looked at The Way Kids Understand Stories and Why Kicking in the Butt Sells Better than Kindness. Both of these panels were absolutely fascinating to host, I was delighted to spend time with the panelists and hear their take on the world of cinema from a perspective very different to my own. If you’ve got access to ProScreen you can click through on those links and see the discussions.

Working at Pöff is a great honour. The commitment the team have to cinema culture is deeply inspiring. They’re such a great bunch to work with, I absolutely relish the meaningful connections that it offers in the most wonderful of settings. Come to Estonia, it’s just brilliant.

Here’s the recording of Kicking in the Butt Sells Better than Kindness.