Tallinn Fekete Éjszakák Fesztivál
From 3-19 November 2023, the prestigious Black Nights Film Festival was held in the Estonian capital and Tartu. Thanks to the cooperation of the Liszt Institute in Tallinn, ten Hungarian films - or Hungarian co-productions - were included in the festival's competition programme this year. At the PÖFF Shorts Short Film and Animation Festival, which took place in the framework of the event, the Best Animated Short Film award was won by Olivér Hegyi's The Garden of the Heart 2022, which automatically qualified for the 2025 Academy Awards.
The festival, which has been running since 1997, is one of the three A-list film festivals in Central and Northern Europe, alongside Karlovy Vary and Warsaw. Its core objective is to present a comprehensive selection of the latest film production, screening films of high artistic quality to local and international audiences.
In 2013, the festival awarded István Szabó with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Two years ago, Hungary was the guest of honour at PÖFF Shorts, marking the 120th anniversary of Hungarian cinema and the centenary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Last year, Noémi Veronika Szakonyi's Six Weeks won the Grand Prize in the Just Film competition category as one of 13 Hungarian films.
This year, ten Hungarian films - or Hungarian co-productions - were screened thanks to the contribution of the Hungarian Cultural Institute. Filip Pošivač: Tomi, Polli and the Magic Light (2023), Rozália Szeleczki: Cicaverzum (2023), László Csáki: Blue Pelican (2023), Szabolcs Hajdu: Kálmán-nap (2023), Béla Tarr: The London Man (2007), Máté Konkol: Who Throws His Bed (2022), Flora Anna Buda: 27 (2023), Kristóf Zénó Mira: Fox Tossing (2023), Domonkos Erhardt: The Corner of My Eye (2022).
At the PÖFF Shorts Short Film and Animation Festival, the Best Animated Short Film Award was won by Olivér Hegyi's The Garden of the Heart (2022), which automatically qualified for the 2025 Academy Awards. The director-screenwriter has brought to the screen the strange world of ideas of people involved in the arts. The work follows a few hours of Dániel Juhász's interview for a job as a painter; the real-life plot is interrupted by the appearance of strange, repulsive insects and rodents. According to the jury, The Garden of the Heart "has a wonderful, humorous and honest approach, and the visual elements of the film rhyme perfectly with the subject matter."