This year's festival is showing 20 films across two locations, the Elektriteater, and the Town Hall square (Raekoja plats), the latter as an outdoor film show.

"In addition to the movie program, we the Naiiv vessel, on the Emajõgi River. This is our 'love ship,' where various parties and events take place," festival manager Johan Kudu told ETV news show "Aktuaalne kaamera" (AK). Naiiv is a nightclub most of the year round.

Tartuff 2023 ends on Saturday with the movie-musical "Grease", marking its 45th anniversary this year.

Longtime Tartuff fans Margo and Vanessa are a couple who met at a previous edition of the festival, a decade ago. Margo told AK that: "I've been going for ten years now. I just went because I had free time and then I met a girl, a nice girl, right here."

"We met at Tartuff. And I invited her to meet up and then she came here and that's how we got together, and now we've been coming together here for nine years," he went on.

Tartuff program manager Edvinas Pukšta, said that before the festival he had not even been to Tartu before and therefore did not know what kind of audience to expect. 

Pukšta said he chose the films with the aim of creating an agenda as varied as possible, but also somewhat surprising from the perspective of a romantic film festival.

Another practice some Tartuff-goers have been known to pursue is to take bedding: A mattress, camp-bed, or even an actual bed or sofa on which to recline, while watching the movies something which Margo and Vanessa have been doing.

The Tartuff festival comes under the Tallinn Black Nights (PÖFF) runs until Saturday, with several showings per day.

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