“A Win-Win Situation”: Marianna Kaat Launches the Inaugural Doc Competition at Tallinn Black Nights

I’ve known Tallinn and its Black Nights Film Festival (also known as PÖFF) for a long time. I first went there in the winter of 2013 to visit a dear friend. “There’s a film festival going on here—let’s go to the movies,” he told me. That evening, we watched Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, which would go on to win the top prize before scooping the Academy Award for Best International Feature only a few months later.

A year later, I moved to Tallinn to pursue my MA in Documentary Directing. I spent almost four years there, attending the festival each time with great anticipation. I gradually saw the event grow to its current size as an A-list festival enriched by a vast industry sidebar and one of the key European gatherings for arthouse cinema. Now that I’m a bit older and a full-time journalist and critic, I still visit the Estonian capital with great pleasure each November.

This year, there’s a lovely surprise awaiting nonfiction enthusiasts like myself. PÖFF will be celebrating its first documentary competition, Doc@PÖFF, featuring 11 titles—all of them international or world premieres.

Ahead of the festival, running this year from November 8-24, I spoke to Marianna Kaat, curator of this brand-new section. Kaat is a prominent documentary director and producer in Estonia and founded her own firm, Baltic Film Production, in 1998. Alongside filmmaking and programming, she wears many other hats, including that of documentary lecturer at Tallinn University’s Baltic Film and Media School—the very place that brought me to Estonia to pursue my studies in 2014.

Kaat unpacked the line-up of this year’s competition, its raison d’être, and the work she has carried out with her fellow programmers. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: PÖFF is already a well-established event. Why did you decide to add a dedicated documentary competition this year?

MARIANNA KAAT: It wasn’t my decision! [Laughs.] It’s Tiina [Lokk, the festival director] who made it. But we had long discussed this possibility, not just this year. We didn’t have much time to talk about it, but somehow both of us understood it’d be good if we had a competition for documentaries as well. Personally, I’ve always felt this lack here in Estonia. For example, I was a bit envious of Latvia, as they host their pitching and industry event Baltic Sea Forum for Documentaries, and we only had Docpoint, which is not so much of a festival as it is a series of screenings. It’s an initiative that’s part of the biggest festival of the same name based in Helsinki. 

We really needed this, especially for our country’s industry. We’ve got a very strong documentary filmmaking scene and it’s always a win-win situation if we invite good films and have the chance of premiering them here in Estonia, and as filmmakers, we get the chance to uplift our networking here. PÖFF is such a really well-established festival it was a pity there was not a dedicated program.

D: What about the size of your programming team?

MK: We are a team of four. I serve as the curator, and then we’ve got Edvinas Pukšta, Mikk Granström, and Mike Arnott on board. Mike is a new hire. Last year, he volunteered at the festival. He’s a British filmmaker who moved to Tallinn because of his Estonian girlfriend. 

D: How many submissions did you receive? How did you pick the 11 titles that made it to the official line-up?

MK: I don’t know the exact number—I can say how we were working, though. We were selecting a bulk of about 15 films each week, and then once a week we met to discuss what we watched, and carried on with 15 more, and so on… We started quite late. I remember that the first press release about this new competition was out sometime in May.

D: Were you both watching submissions and scouting gems at festivals and markets?

MK: In this sense, Edvinas helped a lot because he travels to so many festivals and watches so many films… I think he’s got 35 hours in his day! 

D: He’s already a legend, everybody in Europe knows him…
MK: He’s phenomenal. As we were looking for competition titles, we needed world and international premieres. But where can you watch them? How can you find them? Of course, many sales agents sent us their catalogs, and we picked some from festivals taking place in summer or close to our dates. And we picked some submissions too.

D: Did you set any criteria to select these films? Were you, for example, looking for creative documentaries, or placing an emphasis on some regions of the world?

MK: I think our main goal was to find author-driven documentaries that wouldn’t fit neatly into TV slots—for example, films not heavily reliant on interviews, B-rolls, and all that. We aimed for those boasting an emotionally strong story, are well crafted, and carry a clear author-driven message, something we can’t read in the newspapers.

We didn’t make any distinctions between established and emerging filmmakers. That said, we were really happy to discover some newcomers and their debut films. When it comes to [first-time] docmakers, sometimes you can see that the film isn’t well-polished [technically]. For example, it probably needed more time for editing. But if that particular film gifts us with strong characters or exceptional access, revealing something we’ve never heard or seen… That’s something we’d like to screen.

D: How would you describe the journey of curating this year’s selection? What do you hope audiences take away from it?

MK: Our work focused on two programs, the Doc@PÖFF competition, made up of 11 titles, and 17 more films for the Best of Festivals showcase.

The Best of Festivals section has been easy work. The films are all good—it was more a matter of choosing what’s best for our local audience.

But if I look at the doc competition lineup, I’d say it’s quite diverse. Several films aim to [generalist] audiences, and they will like them very much—they’re very well crafted, tell good stories, and have funny moments.

That said, documentaries are made for an exceptional audience. Viewers are requested to put more intellectual effort; they have to be aware of what’s happening in the world and be curious to discover new films, new subjects, new places…

D: Looking at this line-up you’ve built, what type of audience do you seek to attract?

MK: I’ve been at many festivals in my life and I know that in many well-established documentary fests like Hot Docs, the audience is usually much older. They’re very smart, intelligent people but grew up with the festival experience. Because of our recent history, our audience is surely younger, so we need to think about them. At the same time, our audience is quite informed. Our public broadcaster used to show (and still shows) many good documentaries. Our audience is a little more “developed,” I’d say, so showing them anything is not enough—they’ve got a fine palate.

Davide Abbatescianni is a film critic and journalist based in Rome. He works as an International Reporter for Cineuropa and regularly contributes to publications such as Variety, New Scientist, The New Arab, Business Doc Europe, and the Nordisk Film & TV Fond website. He also serves as a programmer for the Torino Film Festival, one of Italy’s largest cinematic gatherings.