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Short film festival – a sub-festival of the A-List Black Nights Film Festival – will include 2016 Palme D’or, Academy Award and Crystal Bear Winners

International Short Film Festival Sleepwalkers, which runs from November 12th-16th 2016, has announced its full competition line-up. Across four competitions, Sleepwalkers – a sub-festival of the A-List Black Nights Film Festival – will give audiences in Tallinn, Estonia the opportunity to see some of the very best short fiction, documentary and experimental films from across the world. It will screen over 160 short films from 44 different countries.

International Film Festival Sleepwalkers will take place in its traditional home of BFM (Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School) as well as screening at venues in Telliskivi Creative City, on the outskirts of Tallinn city centre.

The festival’s International Competition (presented by ERR) will showcase a mixture of films from the festival circuit and brand new films for people to discover. The three programmes will include Timecode (Dir. Juanjo Giménez, Spain, 2016), a story of two security guards who communicate via CCTV. This clever film won this year’s Palme D’or for Best Short at the Cannes Film Festival. The section will also contain Stutterer (Dir. Ben Cleary, UK, 2015), a story of a man with a bad stutter who must meet his online crush, which won this year’s Academy Award for Best Short Film and Balcony (Dir. Toby Fell-Holden, UK, 2016), the tale of a girl who forms a friendship with a Muslim girl on an English council estate which won a  Crystal Bear for Best Short Film at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

The Sleepwalkers Student Competition (presented by Playstation) focuses on a new generation of filmmakers with films from such acclaimed film schools as Sarajevo’s film.factory and Filmakademie Vienna. This year’s three programmes of films will include Where The Woods End (Dir. Felix Ahrens, Germany, 2016) a dark and complex film about a policewoman who deals with the aftermath of shooting a suspect. The film won a Student Academy Award for 2016. Also in the Student Competition is Sweet Maddie Stone (Dir. Brady Hood, UK, 2016) an energetic take on social realism which follows the trials and tribulations of a schoolgirl who must raise her father’s bail money. The film recently won the Grand Prix at Encounters, one of the UK’s most prestigious film festivals.

The Sleepwalkers Baltic Sea Competition (presented by Sony) will provide three programmes of films that contain some of the light and dark that makes up the very best of filmmaking in the Baltic and Nordic countries. This section will screen Waterfall, a new documentary from noted Latvian filmmaker Laila Pakalnina whose feature Dawn had its world premiere at Black Nights in 2015.

The Sleepwalkers National Competition (presented by Overall) will feature some of the very best films made in 2016 in Estonia. Two programmes will follow very distinct themes with the first, Crime and Punishment, featuring films with people dealing with the consequences of their actions. This will include the experimental film Patarei Prison (Dir. Richard Carbonell, Estonia, 2015) which was shot in the infamous Estonian facility. The second programme, titled From Beginning To The End, takes the audience through a journey of life from Work With The Pain (Dir. Epp Kubu, Estonia, 2016) – a documentary about the emergence of a new life – to final film Elle (Dir. Urmas Mand, Estonia, 2016), the world premiere of a film following an old woman look back on her life.

Laurence Boyce, International Film Festival Sleepwalkers Head of Programme said:

“The films in our competitions deal with many of the hot topics in our world today – immigration, identity, social media, and a general anxiety about the state of the world. Yet there is such a diversity of styles and approaches across the competitions that it shows you the sheer amount of creativity in short films today. With new venues at Telliskivi Creative City alongside our traditional home at the BFM we look forward to reaching out to new audiences and giving them the chance to see some great films.”

Alongside the competition programmes, the Sleepwalkers Film School in Focus will be Le Fresnoy, one of France’s top film schools. There will also be a chance to experience films all throughout the evening with the Sleepwalkers Night Cinema, to be held this year in the Club of Different Rooms at Telliskivi Creative City and After ’16, a selection of short films specially commissioned by the Irish Film Board in 2015 exploring the Easter Rising of 1916.

International Film Festival Sleepwalkers takes place from 12th-16th November 2016. Full programme info can be found at

The Black Nights Film Festival runs from 11th-27th November 2016. For more information go to

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