The animated-experimental short, Events Meant to Be Forgotten, will appear in the competition entitled Rebels With a Cause, which is part of the main programme at the Black Nights Film Festival, and the PÖFF Shorts programme devoted to short and animated films.

Marko Tadić’s film is a visual expression filmed on 16mm tape, based on archival materials and a poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

The film premiered at last year’s 25 FPS festival and has since toured numerous festivals at home and abroad, including the recently closed StopTrik. It is a Kreativi Sindikat (Igor Grubić) and Zagreb Film (Vinko Brešan) production, supported by the Croatian Audiovisual Centre.  

The screening in Tallinn will mark its Baltic premiere. The Rebels With a Cause programme includes 14 feature and 13 short films in contention for festival awards.

In addition, the PÖFF Shorts will also feature the animated film, All Those Sensations in My Belly, directed by Marko Dješka, in the non-competition programme Animated Realities. The programme is devoted to important themes that have been neglected during the pandemic, while the screening is scheduled for 21st November.  

All Those Sensations in My Belly centres on Matia’s transition from male to female gender, while trying to find a genuine and intimate bond with a heterosexual male. The film is an Adriatic Animation production (with Draško Ivezić as producer), in co-production with Portuguese animation studio BAP. It had its world premiere last year at the Anibar International Animation Festival, winning the award for Best Film in the Balkan competition, and has since screened and received awards at a string of international festivals. This past October it took home the award for Best Script at the Ottawa International Animation Festival and received the award for Best European Short at the 3D Wire Fest, as well as Special Mentions at Videomedeja in Novi Sad, Big Cartoon Festival in Moscow, MIX Milano, Lanzarote, etc.

PÖFF Shorts is the biggest short and animation festival in the Baltics and an integral part of the Black Nights Film Festival which will screen a Croatian minority co-production, a feature length documentary film 
The Cars We Drove into Capitalism directed by Bulgarian authors Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov. The film is a part of a non-competitive programme, #PÖFFTrending. Croatian co-producer is Dana Budisavljević from Hulahop. The Cars had their world premiere at the end of October in the Dok Leipzig competition programme. 

PÖFF Shorts takes place in Estonia’s capital 16th – 24th November and Black Nights runs 12 – 28th November. 

The winning titles in competition programmes at PÖFF Shorts directly qualify for BAFTA nominations of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the European Film Awards and, as of last year, the Oscars, that is, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards.

Cover photographs: scenes from Events Meant to Be Forgotten; All Those Sensations in My Belly; The Cars We Drove into Capitalism