Folklore Fools Take Center Stage as Tallinn Black Nights Marks 30 Years

Estonia's Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, known as PÖFF, is marking its 30th anniversary with something it has never had before: an official visual identity. The festival turned to celebrated Estonian cartoonist and animation filmmaker Priit Pärn to shape the concept, and the 30th edition runs Nov. 6-22.

Festival marketing head Maria Plees said late this summer that the organizers want to enter the event's next decade "with a fresh perspective and create new traditions." The identity was developed together with the creative agency AD Angels.

Pärn unveiled his design on his 80th birthday. He said the one firm requirement was originality, a poster unlike any used to promote a festival before. He settled on the Kilplased, the foolish yet resourceful people of Estonian folklore, shown making a film. In his words, they have never promoted a festival or been seen making a movie, and when a large group of them sets out to do something together, "failure is out of the question."

The characters will appear across advertising, decorations and other visual elements of the festival. PÖFF said it plans to offer audiences a visually distinctive and artistically ambitious concept each year while giving an Estonian artist a platform. The festival added that the initiative is meant to celebrate culture more broadly, bring cinema into dialogue with other art forms, and introduce Estonian artists to local and international audiences.

Pärn has drawn the Kilplased since 1974, when he was one of the artists on Rein Raamat's animated film The Kilplased. He has also published the comic books The Kilplased and The Kilplased Go Global, and illustrated Eno Raud's book The Kilplased.

In an email exchange with The Hollywood Reporter, Pärn said the agency approached him first from a long list of leading Estonian artists. He brought his wife and fellow animator Olga to the first meeting, and she later helped with the poster as a technical expert. He noted that he is not only a filmmaker but also began as a caricaturist and works as a graphic artist and illustrator.

He said he received no guidelines beyond the required proportions and the demand for originality. Thinking about what a conventional poster should be, he asked what the opposite would be, arrived at wallpaper, and from there quickly reached the Kilplased. The whole process, he said, took about five minutes.

Pärn explained that many European cultures have comparable figures, such as the "Gothamists" of England, and that the Estonian Kilplased trace back to the German town of Schilda and its "Schildbürger." He described the poster as a vibrant flash of glowing yellow against the November night, with a narrow strip of starry sky above and a flurry of filmmaking activity within. He made one exception to the Kilplased's modesty: since it is a film, there had to be a star.

Asked whether the Kilplased might return in a new film or series, Pärn said he did not think so. He joked that he has an original idea, a thriller featuring hundreds of identical Kilplased and Kilplanna-women, but asked where the money would come from and concluded the film will likely never be made.