That internal grounding matters. Tramberg is not stepping into the role as an external figure brought in to redirect the festival from above. Her connection to PÖFF goes back more than 16 years, beginning in rights and print logistics before gradually expanding into broader organisational and programming responsibilities. This long-term experience helps the audience feel assured of her understanding and stability, reinforcing trust in her leadership. When she describes the appointment as “made sense,” the phrase carries weight precisely because it reflects that long accumulation of experience rather than a sudden career leap.

What also becomes evident is that Tramberg understands the role of artistic director less as a platform for self-projection than as a form of stewardship. Her answers repeatedly return to the question of how a festival can remain coherent, distinctive and responsive under pressure. “My mission in general is to keep fighting for bold voices, bold cinema,” she says, but she places equal emphasis on “quality over quantity”. This focus on responsible stewardship reassures the audience that the festival’s future will be guided with care and integrity, fostering confidence in her leadership.

That precision is central to how she speaks about the festival’s internal structure. Tramberg does not describe PÖFF’s sections as simple containers but rather as distinct curatorial environments with distinct responsibilities. Rebels is reserved for cinema that is “visually speaking bold, thematically bold, and film-style bold”. At the same time, Critics’ Picks is positioned as a space for titles that may not be overtly audience-friendly but merit strong critical and curatorial support. The Official Selection and First Feature strands, by contrast, should retain broader appeal. This is not a softening of standards, but a recognition that audience-building is now inseparable from programming. “We, as festival organisers, need to bring people to the cinema,” she says, making clear that the festival’s job is not only to identify strong films, but also to create the conditions in which they can meet viewers.

Her comments on comedy are revealing in this respect. In a festival culture that often confuses seriousness with solemnity, Tramberg argues for a wider emotional range. “I think it’s really sad that everything has to be so serious,” she says, while remaining committed to strong storytelling and cinematic quality. The point is not to dilute the programme, but to acknowledge that accessibility and intelligence are not mutually exclusive. In practical terms, it signals a desire to broaden the emotional temperature of the line-up without compromising its curatorial integrity.

Discovery remains another key pillar of her thinking, though she frames it in more strategic and long-term terms than festival rhetoric often allows. For Tramberg, discovery is not only about selecting a first feature or emerging voice at the point of arrival but also about fostering ongoing relationships with filmmakers. She stresses nurturing filmmakers beyond the debut stage and ensuring the relationship continues into subsequent projects. This long-term approach influences industry partnerships, encouraging sustained collaboration and development beyond initial festival exposure.

The conversation sharpened further when the subject turned to filmmakers and audience strategy. Here, Tramberg is notably direct. She rejects the idea that festivals should act as a corrective for projects that have not clearly considered who they are for. Filmmakers, she argues, need to think seriously about the audience at the development stage rather than treating the festival as a last-minute solution. In one of the interview’s most striking formulations, she dismisses the fantasy of the festival as a “magical unicorn” that can somehow solve positioning problems after the fact. Her own conclusion is blunt and useful: “The job really is curation. Curate, curate, curate.” It is a succinct statement of how she sees the festival’s role — not as a passive showcase, but as an active framing device, where selection, context and audience expectation are tightly linked.

That idea feeds into one of the most important points she makes: the need to think “locally and internationally, locally and internationally”. The repetition is telling. For Tramberg, a festival director cannot operate solely on the logic of global circulation or prestige. Programming must also respond to the specific social and cultural context in which the festival exists. At the same time, it should not be imprisoned by that context. She gives the example of films dealing with integration — subjects that may resonate differently in Estonia than in more visibly multicultural centres such as Berlin — yet argues that this difference is exactly why such films matter. In her formulation, the festival is not merely mirroring what the local audience already knows; it extends and challenges that frame of reference.

That same dual awareness shapes her understanding of PÖFF’s place in the international circuit. Rather than defining the festival solely by scale or prestige, she describes it as a “boutique festival” and a “boutique industry” space. The term is effective because it captures PÖFF’s strategic position: large enough to matter, but still intimate enough to allow for genuine access. In a festival ecosystem increasingly defined by segmentation, hierarchy and rigidly structured networking, Tallinn’s relative permeability becomes a competitive strength. Tramberg repeatedly returns to the value of encounter — the possibility that filmmakers, producers, critics, financiers and other industry players can actually meet, speak and continue conversations across the festival, rather than moving through a sequence of tightly controlled appointments.

Where her thinking becomes especially compelling is on the question of geopolitics. Tramberg does not offer easy moral abstractions, nor does she reduce programming to political posture. Instead, she speaks about the need to read films contextually — to understand their “layers” and “hidden messages”, particularly in a climate shaped by war, sanctions, compromised funding structures and the ethical ambiguities of production under pressure. This is where her background in semiotics becomes unexpectedly relevant. The artistic director, in this formulation, is not simply selecting titles based on artistic merit, but interpreting the conditions under which they emerge and circulate. That is a far more demanding conception of curatorial work, and one that reflects the reality of the present moment.

Her remarks on AI follow the same pattern of measured seriousness. She does not treat the technology as either a miracle or a threat in itself, but as a structural development that the industry will have to regulate. Questions of ownership, authorship and transparency are, for her, more pressing than abstract debates about whether AI should exist at all. It is a pragmatic position that aligns with her broader approach to the festival: the challenge is not to perform certainty, but to establish workable principles for navigating change.

On funding, too, Tramberg is sober rather than dramatic. She acknowledges that culture is often among the first sectors to feel the effects of instability, even though it is also one of the places people turn to when wider circumstances become harder to bear. Her comments on sponsorship and shrinking cash support point to a festival landscape in which resilience will matter as much as curatorial identity. The answer, as she suggests, lies less in optimism than in adaptability: using resources more intelligently, developing new partnerships, and understanding that sustainability is now part of the artistic director’s remit.

What finally distinguishes Tramberg in this conversation is her refusal to overstate. She does not claim easy solutions, and she does not disguise uncertainty where uncertainty genuinely exists. Instead, she comes across as a leader thinking structurally: about how a festival works, what responsibilities it carries, and how it can remain artistically ambitious while also staying attentive to audiences, context and institutional survival. At a time when many festivals are being forced to rethink their purpose as much as their programme, that may be exactly the kind of leadership PÖFF needs.