PÖFF 2026 announces Baltic documentaries: nine burning hot films – DMovies
The fields “country of origin” and “actor” were created in May 2023, and the results are limited to after this date.
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PÖFF 2026 announces Baltic documentaries: nine burning hot films
//=the_title();?>Nataliia Serebriakova examines the Tallinn Black Nights’ selection of regional docs, while also resisting the churlish challenge of singling out movies before watching them
Of the many strands atthe Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, Doc@PÖFF’s Baltic Competition is perhaps the most quietly urgent. Now in its second year, it gathers nine documentaries from Estonia, Latne for co-production partners. Its subject is not simply the Baltic region, but the act of holding on: to family, homeland, memory, the body, the sea and the possibility of life after loss
The 2026 selection contains five world premieres and an unusually wide emotional range. There are fishermen and dancers, prisoners and veterans, artists and ice sailors; there are melting glaciers, hidden munitions, post-Soviet cities and the long aftermath of war. What unites them is a refusal to treat the personal and the political as separatecategories.
Yuliia Hontaruk’sTo Die to Live stands out as a 116-minute documentary shaped during more than a decade of working with Ukrainian veterans of the Donbas war. Following fighters fromthe early battles near Shyrokyne through civilian life and back into the full-scale invasion of 2022, it promisesless a conventional war chronicle than a fragmented, intimate study of trauma, identity and survival.
Pepe Andreu and Rafa Molés’s La Pietà offers an elegiac portrait of Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier and the family who devoted their lives to observing its gradual transformation. At the other end of the programme’s emotional spectrum, Mihkel Oksmann’s Ice, Men and a Starling follows the director’s 85-year-old grandfather as he builds yet another iceboat – a film that treats stubborn passion as a form of freedom.
There is also much to anticipate in Baltic UXO, which uncovers the legacy of 1.6 million tonnes of unexploded wartime ordnance dumped in the Baltic and North Seas, and in Laura Liventaal’s The Perfect, a portrait of ballet’s beauty, discipline and hidden cruelty. Really, though, it is churlish to single out films before seeing them: the real test lies in allowing these documentaries to show how history, landscape and memory continue toshape the present.
Below are the 10 titles selected for this year’sDoc@PÖFF Baltic Competitionselection:
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Baltic UXO (Alexander Belinski, Agnė Dovydaitytė) – Lithuania, Germany, Latvia;
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i want to be human (Rinaldas Tomaševičius) – Lithuania;
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Ice, Men and a Starling(Mihkel Oksmann) – Estonia;
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La Pietà (Pepe Andreu, Rafa Molés) – Iceland, Lithuania, Spain;
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Living On (Nerijus Milerius) – Lithuania;
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Memory from the Sea (Francesco Rufini) – Lithuania;
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Riga my Love (Karolina Peterson) – Latvia;
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The Perfect (Laura Liventaal) – Laura Liventaal; and
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To Die To Live (Yuliia Hontaruk) – Ukraine, Lat
Just click here in order to check the full selection on the Festival’s website.
Pictured on of this article are Memories from the Sea (top) and The Perfect (middle).
The fields “country of origin” and “actor” were created in May 2023, and the results are limited to after this date.
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