Transilvania International Film Festival returns!

Transilvania International Film Festival returns!

Postponed by restrictive anti-pandemic measures adopted all over the world this spring, Transilvania International Film Festival announces new dates for its 19th edition: July 31-August 9 2020, in Cluj, Romania. Transilvania IFF returns with a summer edition featuring outdoor screenings organized in various locations in Cluj, in clearly delineated spaces, with chairs set apart.

150 features will be screened during the festival, from the usual slate of around 200. Dedicated to first-time or sophomore feature film directors, the Transilvania IFF 2020 Official Competition features 12 provocative stories and just as many original approaches competing for the Transilvania Trophy. Eight of them are feature film debuts for directors who are just starting out or have already made a name for themselves as series or documentary film directors.

As has been the case every year, this year’s competition consists of surprising, daring, and cutting-edge stories in diverse genres, from black comedy through thriller to erotic drama and experimental film, all revolving around family dynamics and the inherent crises that come along with it,

said TIFF Artistic Director, Mihai Chirilov.

Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy, 2019)

From Colombia, the country where the TIFF jury’s prize went last year for Alejandro Landes’s Monos, comes Nicolás Rincón Gille’s troubling debut Tantas almas, about a desperate father trying to recover the bodies of his two sons felled by civil war cruelty. Another desperate father is at the heart of Polish director Bartosz Kruhlik’s Supernova, “a vibrant story oscillating between drama, thriller and a disaster” (Film New Europe) about an apparently quiet community struck by tragedy out of the blue, spectacularly choreographed and filmed exclusively along a country road.

Belgian director Tim Mielants makes his big screen debut with the Karlovy Vary direction award-winner Patrick, o black tragicomedy placed in a naturist camp about the unmooring of a silent man following the sudden death of his father. An existential crisis awaits the protagonist of Rialto, whose family life begins to unravel as he finds consolation in the arms of a 19 year-old hustler in the second film of Irish director Peter Mackie, Burns, which premiered in Venice.

How many sacrifices would you be willing to make for your family — this is the question that troubles Ida, the hero of Wildlife, the first film from Danish director Jeanette Nordahl, which premiered this year in Berlin. Babyteeth, the debut film from Australian director Shannon Murphy, is also captivating and surprising: two parents discover that their cancer-stricken 16 year-old daughter (Eliza Scanlen) who fell in love with a drug dealer.

A selection of these titles will also be made available online simultaneously, in Romania, on Transilvania IFF’s streaming platform TIFF Unlimited.

On the other hand, the Romanian film program is richer than ever in premieres – a record of 21 features and 16 shorts will screen in the presence of filmmakers in Cluj Napoca between July 31 and August 9. Fifteen of these will have their Romanian premieres, while seven of them will have their world premieres in the Romanian Days section.

Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, 2020)

To name only a few: Cristi Puiu’s period drama, Malmkrog, which won the directing award in Berlinale’s new Encounters section and Radu Jude’s Tipografic Majuscul / Uppercase Print which also comes from Berlin and juxtaposes Romanian state television archives with the true story of a teenager who wrote subversive graffiti during the last years of Communism, but also Dan Chișu’s 5 minute / 5 Minutes Too Late, a true story about police intervention in a protest against an LGBT themed film screening at the Romanian Peasant’s Museum in Bucharest.

Și poate mai trăiesc și azi (Tudor Cristian Jurgiu, 2019)

The Romanian Days selection is completed by 16 shorts, most of them presented in premiere: Contraindicații / Contraindications (dir. Lucia Chicos), included in the 2020 Cinéfondation selection in Cannes; El iubește ochii mei / He Loves My Eyes (dir. Enxhi Rista), which was voted best short documentary at the 2020 Gopo Awards and others.

We’re happy to be there to document the last few days of the festival in a summer full of uncertainty.