Day 10 at Black Nights is a dance between fairy tales and reality
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How far will you go, to lay bare the truth? And is reality to be idealized at all, or should we rather take comfort and pride in our imagination or utopian dreams? Dive into today's stories, where fairytales, hopes, and harsh truths intertwine.

The second Sunday of the festival marks also the announcement of the second Lifetime Achievement Award, to a filmmaker that has made her mark in de film industry and has strong ties to our special New German Cinema Focus programme. On this day we also welcome several premieres in our Rebels with a Cause Competition - the films you want to watch if you’re looking to be surprised, inspired and shaken up - in a good way.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to get into some classics of Estonian cinema, our ‘101 Estonian films’ programme has got you covered. Or see some of the most recent and actual films in the selection of shorts ‘Made in Corona’.

Read on for more recommendations and see the full programme here

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Colourful Dreams

14:00 | Artis 1

Little Kati (Katrin Zilinska) spends her summer in the country, in the company of herself and her two friends. In her imagination, the world is entirely different from ours. Her mother (Raine Loo) arrives after a while to pick her up and take her back to the city. Kati and the kitten she managed to grab along from the country now have to figure out if their imagination can soar freely in the city as well.

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Bitter Love

15:15 | Apollo Solaris 3

A lovesick misfit, a mysterious beauty, a retired civil servant, a randy fortuneteller and a doubtful young couple meet in late summer on a Russian river cruise on Volga.

As many other passengers, they board the ship with broken hearts and shattered illusions, but also hoping for a change into better, seeking peace and space to come into terms with meaning for their lives.
What does fate have in store for them?

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In the Mirror (World Premiere)

15:45 | Coca-Cola Plaza iSense + Q&A with Laila Pakalnina, Gints Berzins, Anrijs Krenbergs
18:45 | Virtual Hall

With her creative works which determinedly experiment with the language of film and the narrative, director and screenwriter Laila Pakalniņa has become renowned both at film festivals far away and right here at PÖFF last year with her documentary "The Spoon". Her film "The Shoe" intertwined fairy-tales with social criticism at Cannes as early as in 1998. After "Cinderella", she this time takes on "Snow White" We can all remember the evil stepmother whose sinister nature manifested in boundless self-admiration as she demanded daily praise from her reflection? Today, people talk to their reflection regularly multiple times more than the evil stepmother ever did throughout the entire fairy-tale.

Part of the Official Selection - Competition

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Marianne and Juliane

18:00 | Coca-Cola Plaza 7 (Special Festive Screening for Lifetime Achievement Award)

West Germany, in the 1970s: Juliane meets her sister Marianne, who has been living underground due to a conviction for a terrorist arson attack. The two are close to one another, but increasingly do not see eye to eye. Not long afterwards, Marianne is arrested; Juliane’s visits to her mostly end acrimoniously. In 1977 Marianne dies in a prison cell; Juliane refuses to believe the official version of events, which claims her sister committed suicide. She wants to expose the truth.

Margarethe von Trotta took her inspiration for "Marianne and Juliane" from the life of RAF terrorist Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Christiane. Winner of Venice Film Festival.

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Estanislao (World Premiere)

18:15 | Coca-Cola Plaza 4 + Q&A with Mariana Monroy

Mateo is a resentful and mysterious guy who never shows his real feelings. After a fifteen-year-absence Mateo returns to his childhood home to say farewell to his recently deceased mother. There, he will have to get along with an alcoholic father whom he cannot stand and with a bird-shaped creature that torments him every night.

With a use of stunning black and white cinematography to give more mystique and to shape properly the metaphor, Alejandro Guzmán Alvarez (an old friend of PÖFF) brings us an enigmatic story the aura of which lays on horror movies’ rule: monsters are made of our own fears.

Part of Rebels with a Cause Competition

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Walchensee Forever

18:45 | Artis 2

Rarely can a documentary be this intimate while speaking about the whole world – in- and outside – at the same time. Much lauded since its premiere at Berlinale 2020, director Janna Ji Wonders tells the story of the women in her family over the last century.

An additional protagonist is mind-blowingly beautiful Lake Walchensee in Bavaria, where the family opened a café in 1920 which still exists today.

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Barefoot: The Mark Baumer Story

18:45 | Apollo Solaris 4

Mark Baumer’s awful death at age 33 received more media attention than the protest that he was engaged in at the time, a bold months-long undertaking that some would call crazy. The symbolism of that death is inescapable: While walking barefoot across the United States to call attention to the impact of fossil fuels on the environment, he was struck by a gas-guzzling SUV. It was a violent end to an exceptionally creative life.

Part of the Environmental Film Programme

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Wrath of Desire (World Premiere)

20:30 | Coca-Cola Plaza 4 LUXE
23:30 | Virtual Hall

Zero Chou is a director who has dedicated her entire professional career to depicting LGBT+ relationships. Being the only Taiwanese director who is openly lesbian, her characters are thoroughly contemplated and relatively realistic.

Together with her cinematographer partner, she has launched a project called Over the Rainbow with the idea to produce 6 films about the LGBT+ communities of different Asian cities. This film is one of the six. The main characters of the film are linked by the fact that they all have traumatic experiences hidden away in their past. The story focuses on a prosecutor who feels very strong empathy towards the accused, even going so far that intimate love can emerge.