The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PӦFF) runs in-person in Tallinn, Estonia from November 3-19. The Boston Hassle’s Joshua Polanski will be reviewing and interviewing live from Estonia as part of his multi-outlet coverage of the festival. Be sure to check out his website for updates on additional coverage. 

HADA (2023) dir. Alex Mañas — World Premiere

During my junior year of college, a co-worker and friend at the campus writing center and I talked about how great it was that nobody had died in three years at our college—a statistical improbability. I commented to her that it was especially great that there had been no suicides, something most American high schools even have to reckon with. A third person in the room, another student co-worker a few years our younger, piqued interest in our conversation. I don’t remember precisely what he said, though I do remember that he asked when the last campus suicide was. Neither my friend nor I knew. 

About a year later, that third person in the room, my coworker and friend, killed himself. 

Wracked with guilt, I wondered whether or not that conversation he overheard gave him the idea or influenced his decision to end his life. Part of me wonders how it couldn’t have. This is the predicament of Hada, the directorial debut of Spanish director Alex Mañas, which had its world premiere on Sunday, November 5th in Tallinn as part of Just Film’s International Youth Competition Programme through ​​the 23rd Youth and Children’s Film Festival (a side festival to PӦFF).

The story itself is not an adaptation of the story of Amanda Todd, the Canadian teenager and cyberbully victim who took her own life in 2015, but Mañas cites both Todd’s tragic story and the suicide of a high school basketball teammate as inspiring his film. The Catalan language drama centers around the suicide of teenage basketball player Hada and the hole her departure leaves in the lives of her friends. Hada saw one of those friends, Sara (Sara Espías), in a play just days before she took her life. Sara only finds out Hada saw her perform afterward, and the news crushes her: her character commits suicide in the play’s finale.

I don’t think I am capable of separating my own experiences from Sara’s trauma. So, I won’t even walk through the motions of such an attempt. Hada is an excellent film; it is also a deeply personal one.

I usually have a strong distaste for overly didactic films (see more below). When the message being taught by a film is especially important, occasionally didacticism is a forgivable sin if it’s handled with narrative important and compelling filmmaking—and that’s the case here (or in any suicide film). Maybe even that’s unfair. I don’t think Mañas really sets out to teach all that much; he treats Hada like any drama, albeit one aimed at a young audience. Naturally, though, as the filmmakers and especially the actors build empathy for their characters and their departed friend, empathy implicitly functions didactically, even if it remains a compelling emotional journey for the film. If we feel, we understand.

As we get to know each of her friends, we really get the sense that there is a missing character in this film, a gaping hole that can never be filled. Hada herself is never shown; there are no flashbacks or even photos—a tempting but easy escape from the emotional “trick” of the film. Mañas earns some credit here for sticking with his design for the harder option of concealment.

There’s one particularly outstanding and moving scene of Hada’s friend Júlia (Júlia Ferré), crying in almost shambles at her funeral, somehow still emoting as she plays a recorder. Like the rest of the film, the scene uses handheld cinematography to create unease and instability. It’s a remarkable performance from Ferré, who, like the rest of the cast, is a student of Mañas at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

In any case, for myself, Sara is naturally the most compelling character. She ends the film without a tacky facade of closure or a neat narrative bow to make sense of it all. That would have been an easy, Hollywood “out.” There is no making sense of suicide, taking one’s own life does not leave room for easy conclusions. Life is too complicated to end simply—and Mañas seems to know this quite well.

THE WRITER (2023) dir. Romas Zabarauskas — World Premiere

The risk inevitably involved in small-scale, two-character dramas is always the same: the actors, and the script they play, contain little room for error. In a four-dish dinner, it’s less of an issue if fifty percent of the dishes miss the mark than in a two-dish dinner; despite the fact that the dinner could still be considered equally as “successful,” i.e. a 50% approval rating, the two-course dish is, without fail, going to be less satisfying. And that’s the downfall of The Writer, a queer drama about a one-night encounter in New York City between a Lithuanian-American writer and a Russian-Lithuanian who served together in the Red Army many moons ago. With just the two performances of an overly didactic script, there is too little room for error.

Dima (Jamie Day) reaches out to his former lover Kostas (Bruce Ross), now a successful metropolitan writer, on a trip for a job interview in New York City. The two are optimists in their own ways: Dima is a political optimist who finds something to appreciate in the excesses of liberal capitalism; Kostas is a romantic optimist (perhaps sensualist is more accurate here), eager to convince Dima to spend the night. When they aren’t reminiscing on the golden and touching days of their previous flame, their conversations trend toward insufferable dinner-table politics. 

Kostas, an annoying Jacobian type of Leftist, can only realize his own politics through abstracts and intellectualism; his life and the choices he makes are ones determined by a free market. Dima is not quite as unbearable of a dialogue partner, though his talking points of therapy and “canceled authors” rub in the wrong direction. Their conversation topics model a Buzzfeed-quality listicle for uninspired and boring conversations between Leftists and liberals: rising Soviet nostalgia, capitalist decline, the moral viability of the United States’ global hegemony, and whether or not God is real. The problem isn’t necessarily the politics of either, nor their dinner-and-wine political conversations, but rather how unlikable both men are and how didactic their script is. “We all have some [mental health issues], especially those of us traumatized by the Soviet regime,” Kostas says to Dima, in a rare but still combative moment of agreement. The line comes off as tart at best and insincere at worst.

The 32-year-old Lithuanian director Romas Zabarauskas shows promise in his tenderness. His cozy and almost idyllic New York City is like few I’ve come across, though it’s only spotted in passing. He somehow preserves the kineticism of the city while translating the energy into something resembling a peaceful autumn Sunday afternoon. Likewise, though Kostas and Dima both come off too pedagogical for this viewer—as if they want to teach me something (though they don’t even know what precisely it is that they want to teach)—there are a few truly delightful and tranquil moments. My favorite scene in the film comes from a moment in the script that could have easily been handled more clumsily: a spontaneous dining room dance between the two leads, as they listen to the beautiful instrumental music of Dima’s ex-wife. The dance is shot in low-key lighting, the film’s only dramatic departure from digital “apartment” style cinematography. 

The Writer
2023
dir. Romas Zabarauskas
86 min.

Hada
2023
dir. Alex Mañas
83 min.