As the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary (along with its industry arm observing a quarter of a century of existence), Davide Abbatescianni took a look at the biggest achievements, and the challenges ahead.
I first encountered Tallinn Black Nights as a film student and an Estonian resident, rather than a journalist on assignment. At the Baltic Film and Media School, my own school, PÖFF was part of everyday life: each November many students volunteered and short film screenings were regularly held on campus. I was living in Tallinn when the Festival secured its Fiapf A-list accreditation in 2014. Twelve years later, its 30th edition invites a question more interesting than how far it has come: what happens when an outsider becomes an institution?
When a 42-year-old Tiina Lokk launched PÖFF in 1997, Estonia was hardly a promising environment in which to establish a gathering of its kind. The country had emerged from Soviet rule only a few years earlier. Cinemas were closing, domestic production was struggling, and Hollywood dominated what remained of theatrical exhibition. Lokk had worked in distribution and journalism and had developed contacts abroad, but she had no guarantee that local audiences would embrace the kind of cinema she wanted to bring them.
“I was actually very afraid to start a festival, because I could not tell whether our audience needed one,” she recalls. “Back then we did not have many goals. We simply wanted to make a very good festival, one that would be attractive above all to its home audience but also to the international film community, because that guaranteed good films in the programme”.
The early years were defined as much by improvisation as by ambition. Films were screened in ageing venues, and later the transition from 35mm to digital projection created another expensive logistical problem. But the Festival gradually built relationships that reached beyond the Baltics. Its European Film Awards hosting duties in 2010 demonstrated how far it had progressed. A decisive shift arrived in 2014, when Fiapf upgraded PÖFF from a specialised competitive festival to a non-specialised international competition (a distinction only held by 17 film festivals worldwide), allowing its main competition to encompass films from any region of the globe.
The invitation had not been an obvious ambition. “I was a Soviet-era girl who knew she would never get to Cannes or Berlin,” Lokk says. She remembers the change as both an achievement and the beginning of a harder challenge: persuading filmmakers to entrust their premieres to a small country without the market power, infrastructure or transport connections of Europe’s traditional cinema capitals. International legitimacy did not magically supply those resources.
For Bernd Buder of FilmFestival Cottbus, Tallinn’s standing has never depended simply on imitating better-established festivals. He locates its strength in a curatorial familiarity with East Central Europe, particularly the political and cultural complexity of films from the region. That knowledge matters to filmmakers, too: it enables conversations with programmers and producers who understand the context of their work without demanding endless explanations. “One can say that East Central Europe is in the DNA of that festival, which is a basis of good selection policies. No simplistic stuff here,” Buder says. The connections are also practical: Cottbus dedicated its Close-Up programme to Estonia in 2025 and Latvia in 2026, with Lithuania planned for 2027.
The 30th edition also marks a carefully managed transfer of artistic responsibility. Lokk remains Festival Director and Chief Executive, while Triin Tramberg, who has spent more than 15 years developing programmes and talent initiatives within PÖFF, assumes Artistic leadership. It is a generational handover, but not a declaration that the festival’s past should be discarded.
“I don’t think PÖFF needs to become something it isn’t. In fact, I think the opposite is true: the older the festival gets, the more important it becomes to know exactly who you are.”
- Triin Tramberg, Artistic Director of PÖFF
She wants the Festival’s identity to be as immediately recognisable to filmmakers as those of Cannes, Venice or Sundance, without confusing visibility with imitation.
Her ambition involves both established directors and emerging voices. Having worked on Script Pool, works-in-progress and talent development, Tramberg approaches programming as a process of discovery that need not end after a filmmaker’s debut. Lesser-known work from established auteurs, she suggests, can be as unexpected as a promising second feature. Asked what audiences and industry guests should associate with a PÖFF film, she answers: “Bold, surprisingly audience-friendly, and capable of becoming a breakout film.”
There is a less comfortable side to that vision. The larger PÖFF becomes, the more competitions, sections and accompanying activities compete for attention. Tramberg acknowledges that the Festival may have reached a natural limit, and that some practices deserve reconsideration not because they have failed, but because they belong to an earlier stage of its development. Lokk, for her part, says she has given her successor a free hand, insisting only on the fundamentals: auteur cinema, freedom of expression and an atmosphere where emerging filmmakers and established names are equally welcome.
The Festival’s rise is inseparable from the development of Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event, which celebrates its 25th edition this year. Its origins were distinctly practical. As industry head Marge Liiske explains, when Riina Sildos and her colleagues launched Baltic Event in 2002, international decision makers seldom travelled to the Baltics. Instead of waiting for recognition, the organisers brought around 20 guests to a two-day showcase in Tallinn. A co-production market followed in 2005. Today, Liiske says, more than 700 international professionals attend each November.
Yet the original economic problem remains. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have limited home markets, and filmmakers require financing, audiences and partners beyond their borders. PÖFF’s international breakthrough in 2014 consequently mattered to the industry platform as well: premieres attracted sales agents, producers and press, while initiatives such as Black Nights Discovery Campus and TV Beats expanded its remit to emerging professionals and series.
“Growth is easy to measure, while impact takes longer to see”, Liiske says. One example is actor Henessi Schmidt, who participated in Black Nights Stars in 2020, signed with the Lisa Richards Agency and subsequently joined Netflix show Vikings: Valhalla. Another is Tereza Nvotová’s Father, presented at the co-production market in 2021, later supported through Black Nights Goes to Cannes and ultimately premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti competition in 2025. These are not claims that a market single-handedly creates films or careers. They show how repeated interventions can help projects and people advance over several years.
Liiske estimates that roughly two thirds of the project teams followed up after the event find a partner or co-producer, whether for the project presented or a subsequent one. In a 2025 guest survey, 41% of respondents identified the regional focus as the platform’s chief distinguishing feature, ahead of the accessibility of participants and its co-production offer. More revealingly, she says that access alone is no longer the defining purpose of a market. With European pitching forums and talent labs proliferating, professionals also need training and guidance through shifts in financing, distribution and working practices.
A good platform today serves both needs: it keeps relationships warm, and it brings people new projects along with the skills to make them happen”.
- Marge Liiske, Head of Industy@Tallinn & Baltic Event
From the sales side, Denis Krupnov, co-managing director of REASON8 Films, describes Tallinn as a useful late-year launchpad, able to build momentum towards Berlin’s European Film Market. Its value is not exclusively transactional. At PÖFF in 2024 he met Turkish filmmaker Seyfettin Tokmak, whose Empire of the Rabbits was competing, and subsequently boarded the film and began working on further projects with him. A more improbable introduction occurred at the Festival’s winter sea swim in the ice-cold waters of the Baltic Sea in 2020, where he met Indonesian filmmaker Razka Robby Ertanto. They later collaborated on Yohanna, which premiered at Rotterdam in 2024.
“Over the years we have discovered several projects there and established relationships that continued well beyond the Festival,” Krupnov says. His sea-swimming habit also captures something harder to reproduce at a giant market: relationships formed outside meeting rooms. He met DMovies founder Victor Fraga in the same freezing waters.
Hugo Rosák of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival places Tallinn within a complementary European geography. “As in Karlovy Vary we are trying to bring together professionals from Central Europe, Tallinn is a place to go if you want to meet professionals from the Baltics and the Nordic region. It is a great connectivity hub and for producers it’s a great place to discover well curated projects from the region.” He also identifies Estonia’s pioneering relationship between technology and cinema as an increasingly valuable asset. Yet Tallinn’s expanding programme brings its own complications.
“Sometimes, it actually feels like there is too much on offer to decide which part of the programme to follow and the event continues to grow and grow. But that’s a very comfortable issue to face.”
- Hugo Rosák, Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
The question of size is not merely aesthetic. Lokk reveals that in 30 years PÖFF’s budget has been safely balanced only once. The Festival and the market are now intertwined operationally and financially, making it difficult to shrink one without weakening the other. Public backing, volunteers, ticket-buying audiences and guests who cover much of their own travel keep the machinery running. The paradox is striking: an internationally accredited festival continues to operate with the fragility of a project fighting to secure its next edition.
“We were such a young A-category festival that we could not afford to close our doors even briefly. We would never have been able to open them again,” Lokk says of its decision to proceed with a hybrid edition in 2020. She sees political instability, economic shocks and insufficient recognition of the creative economy as persistent threats, despite the festival’s cultural and tourism value.
Liiske identifies three connected weaknesses in the Baltic audiovisual industries: insufficient scale, precarious continuity between productions, and the challenge of giving local talent international careers without losing it to larger markets. A festival can help secure partnerships, skills and visibility, she argues, but cannot determine state funding, incentive schemes or studio infrastructure. Even direct flight connections remain beyond its control. Her ambition for Industry@Tallinn at thirty is therefore not simply expansion. She wants greater selectivity in themes rather than restricting the range of people who can take part, preserving the accessibility guests consistently praise.
The three leaders are converging on a difficult conclusion: institutional success does not eliminate structural vulnerability. Adding programmes does not automatically make a festival more valuable, either. The new Artistic Director’s task is to sharpen a curatorial identity. The industry platform’s is to decide which changing professional needs deserve attention. And Lokk must secure the foundations on which both depend.
Their horizons are nevertheless ambitious. Lokk hopes PÖFF will one day have screening venues of its own, perhaps a distribution arm, and better facilities for attracting international visitors. Tramberg wants more recognisable filmmakers and actors to regard a visit to Tallinn as a natural part of presenting their work. Liiske would prefer that her platform be judged by the quality of its decisions rather than by the number of activities it can fit into November.
Thirty years after PÖFF was conceived as a response to a shortage of cinematic choice, the challenge has almost reversed. Tallinn has learned how to attract the world’s cinema and the people who make it. Now it must decide how much of that world it can accommodate without losing sight of why the Festival was created in the first place.
*The article was firstly published at DMovies.org, written by Davide Abbatescianni. *