Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) announces the line-up for Rebels With A Cause, an international competition programme screening 14 feature films, alongside a short films competition that includes 13 entries this year, split across two programmes.

Rebels With A Cause is PÖFF’s showcase for challenging independent productions, offering new perspectives, mesmerising visuals and vigorous storytelling. Some come from experienced masters of experimental forms, some are explosions of youthful imagination. All will leave a lasting impression. Both feature and short competitions will be judged by a jury composed of international film professionals announced next week.

Festival director Tiina Lokk shared her excitement regarding this year’s films, “Rebels with a Cause is a programme designed to surprise: some explode on the screen from the start and some creep up on the viewer with their charms. Each is an intoxicating artwork from a hugely talented director, here to shake up the cinema establishment. It was also a real surprise and honour that so many of the filmmakers chose PÖFF for their world and international premieres this year. We’re sure PÖFF25’s audiences will enjoy the same sense of adventure, excitement and revelation we felt experiencing these 14 films.”

The short film selection often revels in the surrealistic, a reflection of the nonsensical world we live in, but also deals with many important and pressing issues of the day. They come from a mixture of new filmmakers who will lead the way in cinema over the coming years and more established talents, all in their own way, defying the traditional modes of filmmaking.

Rebels with their Shorts Programme 1
Sasha Svirsky’s Berlin-premiering animation Vadim On A Walk opens the first programme, followed by Lefkamos, directed by Yorgos Tzikas - a talent to watch from the “Greek Weird Wave”. How to Die Young in Manila is a strange but brilliant nightlife trip, before Yoakim Bélanger’s female-focussed animation The Walk. Cassandra Bitter Tongue is an international premiere and the latest strident piece from actress/director Ana Moreia, who previously brought her debut Aquapark to PÖFF. Faeze Karimpour’s They Were to Cross the River comes for its world premiere, a well crafted short, created at La Femis film school. Rounding out the programme is some (extremely) dark comedy in Babythump.

Rebels with their Shorts Programme 2
Polish post-apocalyptic animation Moon opens the second programme of Rebels shorts, followed by evocative, 16mm-shot Events Meant To Be Forgotten. Paisley Valentine Walsh’s Eyeholes is a refreshingly experimental world premiere for PÖFF Shorts and marks Walsh out as one to watch. Serbia’s Svetislav Dragomirović also world premieres the dark family drama Body Parts with us. Orthodontics premiered in Cannes and is quite the aesthetic surprise for an Iranian short. Our final Rebels short, from US co-directors David Kennedy and Ruby Baker, is suburban-coming-of-age-tale-done-very-right, Sucking Wind.