What’s on at TIFF 2015

The biggest entry on Romania’s movie calendar, Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF), will reach its 14th run at the end of this month, bringing to Cluj-Napoca highly acclaimed and garlanded productions selected by critics from around the world. BR shares its pick of the program.

By Tatiana Lazar

The 14th run opens with Wild Tales/Relatos Salvajes, nominated in the Best Foreign Film category at this year’s Oscars. A box office hit in its native Argentina, this dark revenge comedy will be shown in Unirii Square on Friday, May 29, at 20:45. Wild Tales will be screened during TIFF as part of the Focus Argentina special program, which will feature the top films from the Latin American country, screened in the presence of many of the directors, actors and producers. On the bill are comedy-drama Dos Disparos/Two Shots Fired, by Martin Rejtman, a writer, director and one of the founders of the New Argentinean Cinema; El cinco, the second feature from the award-winning director of Gigante (2009), Adrián Biniez; and the impressive feature debut, Historia del miedo/History of Fear, from Benjamin Naishtat, which competed in the Berlinale last year.

A dozen movies will go head-to-head this year for the Transilvania Trophy – five debut features and seven by second-time directors – from Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Iceland, Great Britain, Mexico, Spain and the USA.

“This year, I favored intimate films and productions that resort, in an intelligent and surprising manner, to the conventions of genre cinema: emotion and tension. I was interested in the manner in which filmmakers on their first or second feature can make the most – through editing, great acting and directorial savoir faire – of the impact of these stories, which start from a limited set-up, budget and number of characters. There are films with only two or three characters, films whose story rarely leaves the four walls of a room, whose tense action scenes are more efficient than any Hollywood blockbuster,” said Mihai Chirilov, artistic director of TIFF.

Rams (directed by Grímur Hákonarson), which comes to TIFF from Cannes’ Un Certain Regard competition, tells the story of two brothers who haven’t talked to each other for the past four decades and whose lives change when they have to save their most precious possession: their sheep. The heartbreaking Radiator (Tom Browne) looks at the way in which, with old age, parents become like children. Venice sends to Cluj Summer Nights (Mario Fanfani), in which Michel, one half of an apparently perfect couple, has a secret life as Mylène. From the 2014 Karlovy Vary competition comes Paris of the North (Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson), a drama in which a school teacher decides to meet his father after a couple of AA meetings. Suspense and action are the key ingredients in both Six Year Plan (Santiago Cendejas), a noir thriller whose themes are voyeurism and invasion, and in The King’s Surrender (Philipp Leinemann), in which policemen seek revenge after two of their colleagues die during a violent confrontation. The suspense continues in The Lesson (Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov), a realistic drama about a teacher pushed to extremes because of her debts, and in Melbourne (Nima Javidi), the Best Screenplay award recipient in Stockholm, which tells the story of a couple faced with a difficult moral dilemma triggered by a tragic incident. In the lively 600 miles (Gabriel Ripstein), winner of the Best Debut Film at Berlin 2015, Tim Roth plays an American agent whose fate is inexorably connected to the young smuggler he’s chasing. Another Best Debut Film winner, from the 2015 Goya Awards, is 10,000 kilometers (Carlos Marques-Marcet), a passionate love story which unfolds through Skype. This and the troubling The Fire (Juan Schnitman) and Melody (Bernard Bellefroid) are two-handers.

The Supernova category includes productions such as Magical Girl (Carlos Vermut), the main winner at San Sebastian, an impressive neo-noir about a father submitted to a range of strange blackmail in order to fulfill the one last wish of his cancer-stricken daughter. Vie Sauvage (Cédric Kahn), starring Mathieu Kassovitz, which won the San Sebastian Special Jury Prize, tells the story of another father, so obsessed with life away from the big city that he takes his two children around the world for 11 years. The Fool/Durak (Iuri Bikov), last year’s most influential Russian film after Leviathan, is the desperate chronicle of a profoundly corrupt country. Life in a Fishbowl (Baldvin Zophoníasson), Iceland’s Foreign Language Oscar submission, follows the crisscrossing destinies of three people. A Spanish True Detective, cop thriller La isla mínima (Alberto Rodríguez) won the Best Film Award, in addition to another nine trophies, at the 2014 Goya Awards. From the Cannes line-up, local audiences can view Force Majeure (Ruben Ostlund), a Golden Globe nominee in the Best Foreign Film category; Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas), a personal drama of an actress at the end of her career, starring Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart; and Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako), the main Prix Cesar winner (seven trophies), a film about the dramatic change in a city taken over by jihadists.

The No Limit section showcases the most radical films of the year, intended to push the boundaries of cinema and induce contemplation, such as The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland), in which two women isolated in a small house by the forest play a complex erotic game. Ulrich Seidl’s controversial documentary, In the Basement, screened in competition in Venice, brings to the surface the strangest quirks of Austrians, from Third Reich fanatics to sexual fetishists. Another Austria-based entry is the psychological horror Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala) in which twin brothers suspect that something’s amiss with their mother. Sub-aquatic mystery The Forbidden Room (Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson) comes to TIFF from the Forum section of the Berlinale.

Words Are Very Unnecessary includes 11 works which will compete for the FIPRESCI award, presented by the International Federation of Film Critics. “The idea of this section came to me thanks to two films from last year, which are completely without dialogue: Moebius, Kim Ki-duk’s psycho-sexual drama which we screened during TIFF 2014, and The Tribe, a provocative Ukrainian debut whose story takes place in the world of the deaf and the mute. The title of this section, inspired by the lyrics of the Depeche Mode song Enjoy the Silence, was kind of obvious. I was interested – and it was a challenge to find them – in those films in which words are unnecessary and whose power resides in the force and narrative flux of the images,” said Chirilov.

Special features

The Hungarian Opera of Cluj-Napoca will host one of the most spectacular TIFF 2015 events: the showing of a restored copy of the once lost and now found A tolonc/The Exile (June 2, at 20.30), directed by Michael Curtiz and screened in the presence of its legendary director, for the first time ever, 100 years ago in Cluj. For its TIFF transmission, acclaimed composer Attila Pacsay has composed a brand new score which will be performed live during the film by the Hungarian Opera orchestra of Cluj. The highly influential Hungarian-born American Curtiz, renowned for Casablanca, one of the best loved films of all times, made over 50 movies in his native land before leaving for America, but very few have survived the passing of time. The only copy of The Exile was discovered by chance in 2008, in the basement of the Hungarian Institute in New York, and was restored in Budapest laboratories.

Local director Mircea Daneliuc will be celebrated this year in a TIFF retrospective, 40 years after the release of his first feature, Cursa. The ample retrospective includes 12 films, a poster exhibition, photos from sets and other rare documents. The program features some of his most important films, presented in digitally restored copies, with new English translations: Cursa (1975), Vânătoarea de vulpi (1980), Probă de microfon (1980), Croaziera (1981), Glissando (1984), Iacob (1988), A unsprezecea poruncă (1991), Patul conjugal /The Conjugal Bed(1993), Această lehamite (1994), Senatorul melcilor/The Snails’ Senator (1995), Cele ce plutesc/The Floating Things (2009) and his graduation short, Dus-întors (1972).

TIFF stages will also host celebrated musicians and bands such as Zenzile (on May 31, 21.45, Banffy Castle), the best known French dub reggae outfit in the past 20 years or so; Norwegian jazz pianist Tord Gustavsen (May 31, the Students’ House) and the Romanian bands a ROA and Moebius. Concerts will take place in Casa TIFF, the Students’ House, Banffy Castle in Bontida, the Film Deposit, and the newest TIFF location, TIFF Campus.

Transilvania International Film Festival will take place in several locations around Cluj-Napoca, from May 29 to June 7. Tickets can be bought in advance from www.biletemaster.ro.