The 30th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, known as PÖFF, kicks off on November 6 in Tallinn, Estonia, with a lineup of art house world premieres that sound more like dares than movie pitches. The programming team has built the slate around films that go beyond the mainstream and the safe, and several of them are already raising eyebrows.

The most unsettling pitch comes from Hungarian director Attila Hartung, who returns to the festival with the world premiere of Sinless. He premiered his 2019 feature debut, FOMO, at Tallinn. This time, he co-wrote the psychological thriller with horror novelist Attila Veres, and the result sounds like a mix of The Godfather and Thanksgiving.

The story follows Henrik, played by Márk Nagy, who arrives at the Szentiványi family’s castle for a celebratory dinner. The family is part of Hungary’s powerful construction dynasty. Only Anita, his girlfriend and the family’s youngest daughter, suspects why he is really there.

The synopsis promises a slow burn. Wine fills the glasses, and then casual remarks sharpen and silences deepen. For generations, the Szentiványis have moved through the highest political and economic circles, leaving crimes and unspoken debts behind them. The film’s tagline asks whether the young man is the hunter or the hunted.

Hornets, a 3-hour-8-minute runtime and a mother problem

Slovakian director Dominik György is also making a splash with The Two Hornets, which the festival describes as a daring queer story and a diverse, vibrant, chic, and quirky love and revenge thriller. The PÖFF website even suggests György has been influenced by Xavier Dolan, whose film Mommy was shot in the same 1:1 square format used here.

The plot is intimate and messy. Samo, a gay man facing an unplanned pregnancy with a woman overseas, reunites with his narcissistic mother at a remote forest cabin. He is also caught in a drug-fueled affair with his former childhood bully, and he must decide whether to embrace fatherhood or break an inherited family cycle of sin.

The kicker is the film’s running time of 3 hours and 8 minutes. In Samo’s warped reality, omnipresent hornets gain an evil power, pushing him toward a confrontation with his mother that could turn brutal.

György also has an unusual résumé for this project. He wrote, directed, and produced the film. He handled the cinematography and editing, and he holds the music credit as well.

A Nigerian film crew, a crate of gear and a J.J. Abrams nod

PÖFF’s Youth and Children’s Film Festival has its own eyebrow-raiser. The documentary Crocodile follows young Nigerians whose amateur sci-fi films were praised by J.J. Abrams. He called their work brilliant and inventive, and he rallied Bad Robot’s Kate Webster to send the team a crate packed with professional filmmaking gear, cameras, and laptops.

The Critics, the collective behind the films, is based in Kaduna, Nigeria, and made up of friends and family members. The crew has been making movies since childhood with a phone, self-built sets, and plenty of imagination. Power outages and everyday struggles often get in the way.

New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly worked with the team on the film, which premiered at Berlin before heading to Tallinn. The PÖFF website notes that as their films reached an international audience, the group faced new opportunities along with the challenges that come with responsibility.

A daughter, an erotic photographer and four years of cameras

Perhaps the most provocative title in the lineup is Love Exposed, a documentary from Czech filmmaker Filip Remunda. Its logline is blunt: he has spent a lifetime photographing naked women, and now his daughter wants him to reveal himself.

Blanka, a successful film editor, confronts her father, Vlastimil Kula, about his career as an erotic photographer. The film, shot over four years, follows a series of encounters that explore her childhood, his provocative legacy and decades of buried family history. The PÖFF website describes a world that is eccentric, hilarious, uncomfortable and deeply touching, sometimes all at once.

Remunda’s previous films include Czech Dream, which explored consumerism and media manipulation, Czech Peace, and Happiness to All, about a Russian vlogger and cold water swimming record holder who is gradually changing his mind about Putin’s Russia.

A Lithuanian sci-fi riddle and a Dominican gut-health thriller

Lithuanian director Kristijonas Vildziunas brings Dice-Ching-O-Mat to the Baltic Film Competition. The pitch mixes Yasujirō Ozu with Christopher Nolan, and the ancient Chinese Book of Changes with retro sci-fi. Dainius Gavenonis stars as Vilis, a 55-year-old professor of Asian studies who has been so focused on work that he has grown distant from his wife and three children and has missed their health problems.

Vilis wakes up in an elevator-like cube with an old TV set, a mysterious intercom and riddles, including the question, who are you? He must roll dice to move through moments of his own life, and he has to find the green door before it is too late. The film recently premiered at the Warsaw International Film Festival.

From the Dominican Republic comes Sh*t Happens, a dark comedy from José María Cabral, who has seen three of his films submitted for the best international feature Oscar race. The logline is pure bait: when science fails, trust your gut, but don’t ask what the miracle cure is made of.

The story centers on a wealthy household. Verónica controls every bite eaten by her sickly daughter Isabella, while Raúl, a frustrated biotechnologist, experiments with homemade cures. Then he develops a microbiotic treatment with a secret ingredient, and the household’s other illnesses start clearing up too. Soon, a remedy nobody can explain becomes the one thing everyone wants, until the miracle takes an unexpected turn.

Pride, fear and a holiday mystery

Finnish filmmaker Vesa Kuosmanen’s documentary Fruitcakes: Dawn of Drag focuses on a community’s cultural memory. Jolanda, a retired archivist, performed in Finland’s first drag show, Happy Gays, in the late 1970s alongside his friend Mummo. The show drew big audiences. Mummo was one of the first openly gay men in Finland, but the AIDS crisis brought fear and violence, and in 1988 Mummo was killed in his home.

More than 30 years later, Jolanda opens his archive and invites a new generation of drag artists to bring Happy Gays back to the stage. The film mixes 1980s archive footage, staged reconstructions and rehearsal footage with young performers for whom drag is more self-expression than protest. The festival says the film reminds viewers that Pride began partly out of fear.

PÖFF is also offering a holiday surprise with The Mystery Package from Norwegian filmmaker Silje Evensno Jacobsen, who appears in the documentary herself. Nine-year-old Edle and six-year-old Brage want to know why their family has received strange presents every Christmas for 20 years from an anonymous sender. Their filmmaker mother and relatives are all suspects. The festival asks the question the film is built around: will the anonymous benefactor be found before Christmas is over?

Taken together, the lineup shows a festival that is leaning into discomfort, dark humor and family secrets. The 30th edition runs from November 6 and promises that its strangest titles are the ones worth watching first.