Special guest this year is Pirjo Honkasalo (Finland), whose retrospective includes rare works shot in Estonia in the 1990s.

Festival program curator Tristan Priimägi said Honkasalo will be in Estonia herself for the event, after around a decade of inviting her to the festival finally paid off.

"She is special precisely because in the 1990s she shot as many as three films in Estonia that are little known here, but which always rank among the top at major documentary festivals around the world and are also included in retrospectives and elsewhere," Priimägi said.

"Two of them are more religious in theme. 'Mysterion' and 'Tanjuska and the 7 Devils'," he noted.

The two films form the first two parts of a trilogy from the 1990s. "Mysterion" (1991) is about a convent of Russian Orthodox nuns who have dedicated their lives to serving God, while "Tanjuska and the 7 Devils," (1993) is about a ten-year-old Belarusian girl who is believed to have been possessed by the devil (1997's "Atman" is the trilogy's final installment).

Both these two movies were shot in Tallinn, but most relevant to Estonia is the 1996 documentary, "The Cinderella of Tallinn" (Estonian: "Tallinna tuhkatriinu") which portrays metals businesswoman Tiiu Silves, and the era in which she inhabits, shortly after Estonia had become an independent country again. "At the center is Tiiu Silves, who aspires to become one of the 25 richest women in the world, without at all realizing that she is merely a pawn in a larger game, in which the then head of the KGB, Rein Sillar, is trying to stay off camera behind her. Altogether it is a very piquant mix, a completely unique film, because Estonian documentary filmmaking did not really deal with topics like that at the time," Priimägi noted.

As for the broader lineup and among recently made documentaries, this also includes several winners of major international film festivals, and is rich in contrasts. From recent Estonian history, cinema-goers can quickly move over to contemporary Iran, say, or the U.S.

"We have a very well-curated program, just under 40 films, which means we keep the lineup such that people can come to the cinema with relatively strong confidence and the chance of disappointment is minimized," Docpoint program director Kaarel Kuurmaa said.

"For example, the winner of the world's largest documentary festival, 'A Fox Under a Pink Moon,' A beautiful Iranian film by Mehrdad Oskouei, who was also the main guest of our festival in 2020. A very poetic story about a young Iranian woman of Afghan origin and her journey to Europe," he noted.

Kuurmaa also highlighted "'Powow People', which he said is "A very beautiful film about what [singing and dancing] means to Native American communities."
Of other offerings, "'Natchez,' which won at the Tribeca Film Festival, tells the story of a small American town that was the richest in the United States in the 19th century and has remained somewhat stuck in that era. It promotes itself through its neoclassical houses — roughly the same as if Estonians were to promote themselves only through the Baltic German manor houses and forget everything else around them," Kuurmaa went on, adding that extremes meet easily and organically at the festival.

"A Fox Under a Pink Moon," "Powow People" and "Natchez" are all from 2025.

Docpoint runs until Sunday, with screenings at the Artis and Sõprus cinemas in Tallinn, and at Elektriteater in Tartu. The festival's official site is here.

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