As this year's Black Nights festival begins we look at previous winners you can stream at home
by Amber Wilkinson
Amelie
Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival begins in Estonia today. The festival is now in its 26th year and continues to grow, widening its programme with a Critics’ Picks selection for this edition. To celebrate, and ahead of our on-the-ground coverage which will start next week, we thought we’d take a look back at some of the festival’s winners for this week’s Streaming Spotlight to get in the mood.
Tallinn’s Best Film winner in 2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film is a quirky celebration of joie de vivre. The director transports us to a fictionalised Paris and the Cafe des 2 Moulins where his lead character works. Audrey Tautou had screen roles before this, in the likes of Venus Beauty, but this was a film that cemented her fame on the international stage as the quirky cafe waitress determined to improve the lives of those around her. While it may be just a little too sweet for some tastes, even the hardest of heart will find it hard not to admire the boundless energy that encourages us, like Amelie, to notice the small and enjoyable details of life. A love letter to eccentrics everywhere.
Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s debut was the Grand Prize winner in 2006 and he also made an impact at home, picking up the Goya for Best New Director. His film concerns the interlocking stories of two brothers. Jorge (Quim Gutiérrez) is dreaming of a better life than his janitor’s lot, while his incarcerated brother (Antonio de la Torre, on fine form as ever) is embarking on a prison relationship with a fellow inmate (Marta Eturna). Arévalo avoids outright farce in favour of more thought through and intelligent humour and shows he has a directorial eye for a strong image.
Steve McQueen’s intense debut feature recounts the last days of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands’ in Northern Ireland's Maze prison, but also broadens out to examine the atmosphere and events that existed within the infamous H-Blocks of the Long Nesh prison in the early Eighties. The film, which won Tallinn’s Grand Prize in 2008, features a towering performance from Michael Fassbender in the central role, as he moves from zealot to a shadow of the man he was as he succumbs to hunger, the script by Enda Walsh finds time to consider the fabric of Sands' incarceration as well as the man himself. Shot with an eye for brutal beauty by Sean Bobbit, the immaculate craftsmanship serves rather than overshadows the complex portrait of both the time period and Sands himself. As McQueen put it at the time: "For me it was never about left and right it was always about you and me, in a sense of who we are as human beings."
Lynne Ramsay took home the prize for Best Director in 2011 for this gripping adaptation of Lionel Shriver's bestseller about the disconnection between a mother and son and the violence that ensues. Why spoil the plot when there's so much craft to talk about? From the fragmented way that Ramsay builds the picture of what has led up to the point where Kevin's mother Eva (Tilda Swinton, on customarily intense form) is now to the strong colour coding that is frequently drenched in red and the feeling of desolation she creates around Eva more generally, it's a masterclass of filmmaking that retains its ambiguity to the last.
Winner of the Estonian Film section in 2013 this humanist drama went on to be shortlisted for the International Feature Oscar. It’s particularly appropriate to include this film as its star Lembit Ulfsak will have a special programme dedicated to him at this year’s festival. He plays Ivo, a man in a small Caucus village who is helping his friend Margus (Elmo Nüganen), who wants to harvest the year’s crop of tangerines despite their village being in the shadow of the war between Georgia and Russian-backed Abkhazia. When a skirmish breaks out on their doorstep Ivo finds himself nursing both a Chechen mercenary (Giorgi Nakashidze) and an injured Georgian fighter (Mikheil Meskhi) back to health. Director Zaza Urushadze emphasises the tragicomedy of the situation while also showing the insignifance of individual machinations in the face of wider war. Poignant and powerful.
Dinner In AmericaPhoto: Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Aptly this subversive black comedy was the winner in the Rebels Without A Cause section of the festival in 2020. Director Adam Rehmeier - who told us making the film made him realise he’s “a romantic guy at heart” - brings a punk sensibility to this story of an anti-hero Simon (Kyle Gallner) who embarks on an offbeat friendship with Patty (Emily Skeggs), a girl who turns out to have a connection to him already that neither of them knows about. Rehmeier spikily skewers family dysfunction and middle America while gradually revealing the film’s surprisingly sweet-hearted centre.
The schoolyard is a warzone in Laura Wandell’s bullying drama, which won the Best Youth Film award last year. Nora (Maya Vanderbeque) is scared on her first day at school and Wandell ensures we go emotionally with her as she says goodbye to her dad at the gates. She, in fact, begins to forge some tentative friendships but soon discovers that her brother Abel (Günter Duret) is not being so lucky. Wandell keeps us with Nora as she faces the unenviable task of trying to work out the right thing to do in the face of pressure to keep silent. Wandell’s gripping drama shows that playground politics are anything but child’s play. Read what Wandell told us about developing the script through workshops with the children, here.
Our short selection is The Tale Of How which won the Animated Dreams Grand Prize in 2007
