Nurturing young talent and promoting film education is the name of the game at the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, Estonia. The festival will feature a range of events specifically aimed at education promoting both film literacy in schools and vocational training in front of and behind the camera.
The Just Film Industry Days is a new initiative bringing the youth and children’s film festival into conversation with the industry. It has been a long time coming, according to Marge Liiske, head of Industry@Tallinn and Baltic Event: “It’s something that has been cooking for several years. We have more and more films being submitted by young filmmakers and also guests that are coming. It felt right to organize a discussion platform and forum for not only filmmakers, film festival programmers, or sales and distribution people, but also for teachers and the children themselves.”
Festival artistic director Tiina Lokk, a university teacher herself, sees the move as a vital initiative and an extension of the year round program the festival, a.k.a. Pöff, runs called Pöff in Schools, preparing materials that help the teachers to teach film in schools. She tells PvNew: “For 20 of our 27 years we have been working with young people and students, providing them with materials and now there is a network of film teachers that are very active.”
For Liiske, the promotion of film literacy in schools is key to providing filmmakers with an audience: “We see and hear everyday the concerns of our independent arthouse producers and filmmakers, asking where is the audience now? What do we do when even the French audience don’t go and see arthouse movies, and the French arthouse scene that has been the flagship?” Educating young people in film creates a ready-made audience for the films, which festivals such as Tallinn wish to promote.
In addition, the Discovery Campus continues the education theme with a range of masterclasses, live events and workshops. Screenwriters and producers will have the script Pool, a dedicated series of meetings to teach skills from pitching to production. Further aspects of filmmaking are covered in dedicated threads such as Music Meets Film, encouraging music composers into soundtrack composition; the Black Room, aimed at costume and set designers and frame within a frame, for aspiring cinematographers, this year led by the mentorship of Philip Ross. In front of the camera, Black Night Stars spotlights eight young actors from Ukraine and the Baltic Sea region and coaches them on how to operate on an international level. According to Liiske, one of the main benefits of the Discovery Campus is also in providing “a space for the young talent under one umbrella, an area for them to meet, mix and mingle and understand a little better what their future colleagues do.”
The hot button topic of the moment – AI – will also be discussed, but there is a cautious optimism about its influence. “We are talking about AI at least twice a day,” Liiske says. “Because it’s in our lives, and we don’t want it to be a monster under the bed. We really want it to be a tool that film professionals should use. We also have a workshop for writers called AI: Your Staff Writer.”
A more determined optimism is required for the attempt to bring together the countries of the region which are the focus of this year’s edition: Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Slovenia. Estonia, as a NATO country bordering Russia, is well aware of international tensions: “I am not naive, thinking art can save the world. Unfortunately, it’s not true,” Liise says. “But the more connections we have with each other, the better.” Panels on co-financing and regulation integration will hopefully point the way forward to future co-productions and collaboration. No doubt interest will have been aroused by the documentary and Oscar hopeful “The Smoke Sauna Sisterhood,” filmed in southern Estonia.
“We have, as always, hundreds of different panels,” Liiske says. “I like to see Tallinn as a kaleidoscope. There are so many little colorful puzzle pieces, and it changes every time you look at it. But it gives you a beautiful picture. Every time you shake it and look at it, it changes.”
