To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival has invited acclaimed filmmaker and artist Priit Pärn to create this year’s visual identity—the first in the festival’s history to be designed by a filmmaker.

“We want to enter the festival’s next decade with a fresh perspective and create new traditions,” said PÖFF’s Head of Marketing, Maria Plees.

“When I was commissioned to create the poster, the main requirement was that it should be original—something unlike any poster ever used to promote a festival. It did not take me long to decide that it would feature the Kilplased, the foolish yet resourceful folk of Estonian folklore, making a film. Why the Kilplased? Because they have never promoted a film festival before, nor have they ever been seen making a film. Now they are—and there are plenty of them. It is a well-known fact that when a large group of Kilplased sets out to do something together, failure is out of the question. Success is guaranteed,” explained Pärn, who celebrates his 80th birthday today.

The characters featured on the poster will appear throughout this year’s festival identity, coming to life across advertisements, decorations and other visual elements.

For the first time, PÖFF’s visual identity has been developed in collaboration with the creative agency AD Angels. The aim is to present audiences with a visually distinctive and artistically ambitious concept each year, while providing a platform for an Estonian artist and their work. Through this initiative, PÖFF seeks to celebrate culture more broadly, bring cinema into dialogue with other art forms, offer Estonian artists new creative opportunities and introduce their work to both local and international audiences.

A legendary figure in Estonian animation, Priit Pärn has been depicting the Kilplased since 1974, when he worked as one of the artists on Rein Raamat’s animated film The Kilplased. He has published the comic books The Kilplased and The Kilplased Go Global and illustrated Eno Raud’s book The Kilplased.