How Wonderful It Is That There are Roads: The 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

In the opening of his book series Poetics of Cinema, Chilean avant-garde filmmaker Raul Ruiz ponders what it would mean to create a cinema free of the central-conflict theory – the idea that films must necessarily be powered by conflicts and lead to their resolution. As we frequently feel the tenor of modern existence subsumed by political conflicts both real and imagined, I’ve begun to wonder what it might mean to move beyond central conflict theory not just as an avenue of aesthetic experimentation, but as a means of political resistance. For the past eight years, cinema, and culture at large, have felt beholden to an overwrought notion of political resistance that manifests itself in overstuffed political diatribes aimed at the choir. Yet perhaps it’s the entire meta-narrative of grand conflict itself which is preventing us from finding viable alternatives. If, as Ruiz theorizes, there are untapped potentials of cinema beyond the framework of conflict, perhaps trying to reach them would be not just an aesthetic, but a political act, a means of escaping the prechewed narratives inhibiting global and personal freedom. 

I was thinking about this all through my second trip to Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival (or PÖFF, as it is colloquially known), when, while sampling from the over 300 feature films spread across dozens of programs, I began to wonder what might be gleaned from moving forward without a purpose. It wasn’t a great mystery then that I found myself attracted to films that not only motivated, but explored a spirit of wandering and discovery, prompting me to venture beyond traditional understandings of cinematic form.

Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, which I saw on my first night at PÖFF, provided me with a beautiful précis of the beauty of wandering. The story of a father, Irakli (Alexandre’s own father David Koberidze), looking for his daughter after she willfully disappeared while photographing rural soccer fields across Georgia, Dry Leaf feels flush with the sense of freedom only felt through boundless roaming. Irakli moves in circles, treading over mountains, lakes, small towns, and endless fields; his journey is less a narrative catalyst than a vessel for strikingly beautiful images delivered in rhythmic, emotionally moving montages. “How wonderful it is that there are roads” Irakli says to himself late at night toward the end, as if giving voice to the film’s ulterior philosophy; if there is a point to Dry Leaf beyond pure poetry it’s this impetus to allow ourselves to wander. The film’s flowing structure and long runtime allow us space to form our own relationship to the material and embark on our own journey through it, much as Irakli leisurely traverses the Georgian countryside. 

While Koberidze skirts magical realism through the invisible characters that make up most of the supporting cast, a much more fundamental sense of the otherworldly and sublime comes through all of the mundane beauty that his camera lingers on: flowers, grass, cows, cats, trees, goalposts, kids lounging about – all stand as strange, emotionally pungent totems of the world’s beauty. Shot through the 144p lens of a 2008 Sony Ericsson cell phone, the visuals are obscure and muddy, pulsing in the pixelated low-resolution which smears the edges of objects and people and turns the image into a place of exploration and discovery. Often we don’t know at first what we are seeing: a splotch of brown might be a mountain at magic hour or a dog lounging on a road or the back of Irakli’s hand leaning on a goalpost while he admires the view. In Dry Leaf, this level of semi-abstraction becomes another source of freedom for the viewer, offering us room to dream and transcend our standard perceptions of the world.

Leleka

Journey narratives offer an opportunity for open-ended roaming without fully foregoing characterisation or dramatic development. They often inject a sense of the unexpected and the unknown into well-defined categories, allowing political viewpoints or melodramatic frameworks to rub against completely foreign sensations. Such was clear in another great road movie from the festival, Quebecois director Harold Hutter’s Leleka, which mixed experimental abstraction with a detailed sense of character. Shot in beautiful black and white 16mm, Leleka traces the journey of Ukrainian artist Sasha (Olga Kviatkovska) as she travels from Paris to Ukraine with her Belgian friend Margaux (Margaux Dauby). Sasha’s goal is to travel to her motherland and place a statue in honor of her deceased grandmother, but as the film moves across Central and Eastern Europe the destination becomes more evanescent, a structural absence defining the film’s psychogeography of wartime displacement. Conversations explicitly addressing the war are few and far between, but its presence is felt everywhere in the film’s roadside digressions and vistas. Mystifying landscapes and abstract detours carry unexpected emotional weight, with a sense of melancholic longing wrought through an extreme long shot of a car zig-zagging across mountains, or stroboscopic sequences of pure black film leader, imageless save for a pulsing parade of small scratches and flickers that generate a sense of hypnotic absorption.  

Much like Sasha, whose desire to place a sculpture in honor of her grandmother in her home country presents an act of political art-making that is so personal as to remain almost inscrutable to outsiders, Hutter understands that art is so beholden to the world it’s born into that one need not explicitly invoke it. Leleka sponges up something of life during wartime in present-day Europe without propagandising, moralising, or overly-sentimentalising the tragedy. Like Dry Leaf, it finds freedom and room for boundless emotional discovery in the road, locating in its mundanities beautiful entry points into metaphor and understanding. One long sequence where Sasha and Margaux try to find a cafe in an unknown Eastern European town begins as an exercise in futility only to open up, through its patient views of everyday life, into something strangely beautiful. Like Koberidze, Hutter daringly allows us to embark on our own journey through the film, never dictating an emotional response but leaving us to craft our own. 

Border

Estonian director Sasha Shropster’s experimental short film Border was another film that subtly set itself against the backdrop of the Russian-Ukrainian war and explored the political psychogeography of the present. A chronicle of the 80-kilometer journey through Russia that Shropster undertook on foot to visit the grave of her Russian grandmother, the film intertwines physical and emotional landscapes through its matter-of-fact presentation. Shot entirely with a 360-degree VR camera, much like Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge 3, the film is composed mainly of wide-angled, over-the-shoulder footage of Shropster walking through dreary Russian highways in late winter. While keeping the emotional tenor of the journey elusive by almost exclusively showing us her back, Shropster leaves us to question how this landscape, de facto now forbidden to most westerners, carries a certain ineffable emotional charge. Monotonous as it may sometimes come across, the footage is constantly absorbing; it’s as though its repetitiveness invited us to contemplate and wander farther. By withholding a clear emotional or political slant, the piece chooses to inhabit rather than resolve the contradictions between political identity and the physical and psychic spaces which inherently transcend borders. A border can imply a limit, but it also suggests the potential to trespass those very boundaries. Border is an ambivalent political statement: at once emotionally restricted by its droning matter-of-factness and evocative of a deeper emotional space that just might lie beyond our comprehension.

Laguna

Another film intertwining memory, loss, identity, and landscape was Lithuanian director Šarūnas Bartas’s Laguna. A semi-documentary of sorts, Laguna traces Bartas’ journey through the Mexican jungles of Chiapas where his daughter, Ina Marija Bartas, lived out the last few years of her life before dying at 24 in a hit and run accident. The film – not just a record of mourning, but an act of mourning itself – is resolutely melancholic and lethargic. As Šarūnas and Ina’s younger sister Una visit the jungle, we’re treated to all manner of beautiful natural sights, nonetheless free from the kind of  sublimity one might expect from such poetic reverie. Instead of wonder, Laguna conjures an all-pervasive sense of dread, heightened by the director’s ruminative voiceover contemplating what it means to mourn a family member. Breathtaking natural sights, such as sea turtles digging holes in the sand to lay their eggs or caimans waiting out their prey, are delivered through long, immobile shots that undercut the splendour through a sense of affectlessness that evokes loss. Bartas touches the universal, probing the natural circles of life and death that will ultimately remain mysterious to all of us, but remains so vested in the autobiographical, in his own personal journey of mourning, that even the film’s occasional nods to the cosmic feel alienating. Laguna engenders an almost ironic sense of distance, allowing us to explore a highly-specific state of mourning and absorb it at our pace. 

Another movie deeply concerned with the relationship between our mental and physical spaces was Lithuanian director Vytautas Katkus’s The Visitor, which took home the top prize in the festival’s Baltic competition. A film that feels boundless even as it barely moves beyond its constrained geographical settings, the plot follows a man in his mid-thirties, Danielius (Darius Šilėnas), as he spends a summer in his hometown while selling his childhood home. With little to occupy him besides arranging the occasional apartment viewing, Danielius is simultaneously at home and adrift, filling his days dozing in the forest, floating gently on his back in the ocean, and staring longingly at people singing in Karaoke bars. The film embodies Danielius’s apathetic, somnambulistic drifting, moving across time and space in a kind of daze, with no discernable logic or spatiotemporal coordinates. Days pass as indistinguishably as weeks, while the events themselves become so hazy that sometimes one wonders if certain scenes aren’t simply Danielius’s dreams. Peripheral characters such as Tomas (Rokas Siaurusaitis), a teenage neighbor first seen performing bizarre mouth muscle exercises in front of a mirror, sporadically become the narrative focus for no other reason than the camera catches them walking down the street. Unexpected melodramatic twists and other subplots often arise seemingly at random, such as when Danielius asks another neighbor whether he can pretend to be his dad before suddenly bursting into tears and hugging him. 

The Visitor

Serving as his own cinematographer and filming on celluloid, Katkus creates a visual language that is at once naturalistic, luscious, and inscrutable. His images, often focusing on landscapes or domestic environments captured with no artificial lighting, feel ordinary even as they’re framed and edited to elide complete clarity and lucidity of action. Brief snippets of manic dancing, conversations delivered without context, and quasi-surrealist background details – like  the lone apple tree dotting a tiny island seen behind Danielius as he lounges at the beach – subtly displace us from our comfort zone without ever truly shocking us. The film offers a portrait of contemporary ennui – a mood piece of a cultural moment that’s both stifling and stultifying – all while rekindling our curiosity for our surroundings. The Visitor turns boredom into wonder, not through grand gestures or evocations of the sublime, but by tunnelling deeper into the mundane and opening up into the surreal and extraordinary. Katkus creates a precise poetic expression of listlessness, finding in liminality a sense of spontaneity and unexpected discovery that feels almost supernatural.

I can think of few better uses for cinema than to turn the quotidian into a font of freedom and untapped potential. If the world is really as frustrating and impassable as it seems, then the chance to mentally and emotionally wander is one we should never take for granted. I left PÖFF with one of those increasingly rare feelings of optimism and excitement. I had traveled 4,000 miles to better understand how much there is to explore just by staying in place and allowing yourself to take a closer look at what’s around you.

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
November 7–23, 2025
https://poff.ee/en/