Valga Hot Shorts Invites You on a Film Journey
Text Timo Raussi Photos Visit Estonia / Märt Kose
The town of Valga on the Estonian–Latvian border will become a meeting place for film lovers in just over a week, from 3 to 5 July, as it hosts the third international Valga Hot Shorts short film festival.
This year’s festival programme features 27 short films from 16 different countries. The competition sections are divided into four themes, offering audiences plenty to reflect on through drama, animation and documentary storytelling, particularly where the line lies between challenges experienced personally or collectively as exciting, and those that feel more like unpleasant obligations.
The aim of the festival is to highlight new filmmakers and fresh perspectives from around the world. For Finnish audiences, however, this year’s edition offers one additional reason to travel even further south in Estonia beyond Tartu. On Saturday 4 July at 22:00, a special screening dedicated to director Aki Kaurismäki will begin. The retrospective will present short films and a few music videos directed by him between 1986 and 2007: works that have remained in the shadow of his wider filmography and are rarely seen on the big screen.
The same evening concludes with an afterparty inspired by Kaurismäki’s cinematic world, extending the director’s distinctive, dryly humorous atmosphere beyond the screening room at Valga’s Säde hotel, which the organisers describe as “perhaps one of the most Kaurismäki-like places in southeastern Estonia”.
Although the focus of the festival is on short films, the event is much more than simply watching competition entries in the hall of the Valga Cultural Centre. Over the course of three days, festival guests can also take part in guided city tours, discussion events, a free screening of films by young creators, and evening parties spreading out onto the streets of the twin town.
Valga is about a three-hour drive from Tallinn and is also easy to reach by train or bus. The border town offers an interesting opportunity to explore both Estonia and Latvia on the same trip, as crossing the national border, and the line between Valga and Valka, happens almost unnoticed in the middle of the twin town, with no border formalities at all.
Valga Hot Shorts, or “VHS”, was born as part of Tartu’s 2024 European Capital of Culture programme, but has since established itself as a distinctive small festival that attracts both filmmakers and audiences from across Europe.
More information about the festival programme can be found here, and tickets and festival passes can be purchased here.
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