Project EU53196

The goal of the EU53196 project ‘’Black Nights Film Festival’’ is to grow Estonia’s international reputation. This includes increasing the sustainability of the festival and thereby bringing in more economic growth – mainly growing the number of nights guests stay in Estonia, which on its own will bring revenue growth to Tallinn’s service sector. Here an important aspect is also introducing Estonia as a destination for a cultural trip – to completely escape the aged (but in certain circles slowly receding) image of a ‘’cheap Eastern-European’’ country and establish a fresh, more positive narrative of our success stories, (cinema) culture and the art of film. Receiving this funding is of an imperative importance to the preservation of the festival’s international visibility and hopefully – its increase – as a major part of the international press who visits PÖFF, has visited the festival with the help of the means received from this funding. The same applies to improving the quality of PÖFF’s programme – due to the increased visibility in international film industry media, that has occurred as a result of this funding, the number of films applying to PÖFF has thrivingly grown in the past few years, which has been visible in the ever-growing support of film critics towards the festival programme.

The festival’s goals for the new application round are the following:

• Increasing the number of people coming to the festival to cover it and make this process more contemporary – with traditional media putting further emphasis into bringing bloggers, influencers, and youtubers here from our neighbouring countries – Finland and Russia;
• Improving our most important communications and marketing channel – our webpage – to foreign users in order to improve the user experience and make it easier for visitors to orientate through the festival’s sizeable programme and finding suitable films;
• Developing a Russian language version of our homepage to improve the festival experience for Russian-speaking visitors.

The project period: 01.06.2019 – 31.03.2022
The event is supported by measures, funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
EAS supported the project through the creative industries support structures support scheme with 200 000 euros.