TALLINN, Estonia - A film festival's most revealing programming often sits far from its red carpets. At this year's Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, that proving ground is a slate of offbeat titles running from a documentary about a Finnish entrepreneur's spectacular collapse to a drama in which a dying erotic photographer must answer to the daughter he barely raised. The lineup, assembled under the festival's long-running focus on adventurous and unconventional cinema, trades prestige gloss for the kind of oddball premises that tend to divide audiences and ignite post-screening arguments.
The two films framing the festival's eccentric edge could hardly be more different. The documentary "Sh*t Happens" traces the rise and ruin of Jari Sarasvuo, a Finnish businessman and motivational guru whose ventures once made him a household name before financial disaster turned his story into a cautionary tale. On the narrative side, "The Last Session" follows an aging erotic photographer who, facing the end of his life, is forced into an overdue reckoning with the daughter he left behind - a confrontation that turns the camera back on the man who spent a career behind it.
A Festival That Courts the Unclassifiable
Tallinn Black Nights has built a reputation as one of Northern Europe's most eclectic major festivals, and its offbeat strand is a deliberate counterweight to the gala premieres and competition titles that draw the bulk of press attention. Programmers here have long favored work that resists easy genre sorting: documentaries about flawed public figures, character studies with uncomfortable premises, and films that mix humor with existential dread.
That curatorial instinct reflects a broader shift in festival culture. As major events compete for the same high-profile premieres, distinctive mid-tier festivals have leaned into identity through discovery. Tallinn's willingness to program a Sarasvuo documentary alongside an erotic-photographer drama suggests programmers are less interested in matching themes than in matching sensibility - a shared willingness to sit with mess.
Sarasvuo and the Anatomy of a Collapse
"Sh*t Happens" takes its title from the kind of blunt fatalism its subject might once have rejected. Sarasvuo's trajectory - from charismatic coach and media personality to the center of a business implosion - gives the film a built-in narrative arc, but the documentary's real subject appears to be the gap between the philosophy of relentless positivity he sold and the reckoning that followed.
The film arrives at a moment when documentaries about business failure have found receptive audiences, particularly when the fallen figure is charismatic enough to be compelling even in defeat. Sarasvuo fits that mold: a public figure whose self-assurance was both his product and, arguably, his undoing. How the film balances sympathy with scrutiny will likely determine whether it reads as a portrait or a post-mortem.
"The Last Session" and the Price of Looking
"The Last Session" operates on more intimate terrain. An erotic photographer nearing death is confronted by the daughter he neglected, and the setup forces the audience to weigh artistic obsession against familial obligation. The premise invites obvious comparisons to films about artists who mistake control of an image for control of a life, but its power will rest on whether the confrontation feels earned rather than schematic.
Festival audiences have become wary of dramas that use terminal illness as a shortcut to gravitas. What distinguishes this one, at least on paper, is the specificity of its central figure's profession - a man who made his living directing desire through a lens now facing a person who sees him without illusion. That inversion, the subject becoming the subject, is fertile ground if the screenplay resists easy redemption.
What the Offbeat Slate Signals
For Tallinn, the pairing is less a statement than a habit. The festival has consistently used its sidebars to showcase filmmakers and subjects that mainstream distribution overlooks, and this year's odd couple - a fallen motivational guru and a dying photographer - fits that tradition. Neither title arrives with the built-in buzz of a competition premiere, which is precisely the point: these are films meant to be encountered, argued over, and remembered for their willingness to be strange.
Whether either title breaks out beyond the festival circuit is an open question, and one that depends on factors no programmer controls. What the slate does confirm is that Tallinn remains a place where a documentary about a Finnish businessman's ruin and a drama about an erotic photographer's final accounting can share a marquee without either feeling out of place. In a festival landscape increasingly dominated by algorithmic safe bets, that kind of unpredictability is its own recommendation.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter