The 9th Transilvania International Film Festival, briefly known as TIFF, to be held between the 28th of May and 6th of July 2010 in Cluj, Romania, implies as usual a serious dose of cosmopolitism and a necessary touch of irony. The extensive list of guests and films tells enough about the cosmopolite nature of the festival. The irony is usually present everywhere TIFF is marketed, through its usual video clip and through its official poster. Traditionally, each year its promotional video pastiches, mocks or refers to a very well-known film or concept related to film; this year, the victim is the George Lucas franchise Star Wars; in a short clip by Radu Munteanu, the famous, final scene of the third (if you prefer, sixth) installment, Return of the Jedi is given new, comic valences by using two famous Romanian actors, Florin Piersic and Florin Piersic Jr. Matching the video, the poster shows the two, father and son, dueling, using laser swords. It’s pretty obvious even only from this example that TIFF is still a young festival, with a serious part of its public being also young, which would explain the funny parodies. Somehow, TIFF has remained burlesque and pop, with some signs of seriousness, probably still wondering how it was possible that a festival starting more or less serious had become everybody’s favorite pastime at the end of each spring.
Air Doll, regia Hirokazu Kore-eda
As usual, TIFF has managed to bring together quite a few of the most important highlights of various (mostly European) film festivals. Some of the most important ones premiered at Cannes last year, in or out of competition, from Marco Bellocchio’s historical epic Vincere to the astonishing film of a young filmmaker, Xavier Dolan’s I Killed My Mother, from Bong Joon-ho’s drama Mother to the latest Tsai Ming-liang, Visage, from the beautifully photographed comeback of Coppola, Tetro to Nymph by Pan-ek Ratanaruang (a director whose films were previously screened in one of the sections of TIFF, “3x3”), from Air Doll, the latest film of one of Japan’s most gifted directors, Hirokazu Kore-eda, to the winner of the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes last year, against, among others, Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, the disturbing, not-to-be-missed Greek film Dogtooth. Some of the films premiered at the Venice Film Festival – it’s the case of Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen, who is supposed to open the first day of festival, but also the absolute winner of the Golden Lion, the Israeli drama Lebanon. Also, some of this year’s sensations came fresh from the Berlinale; not only Thomas Vinterberg’s awaited Submarino, but also the film that received both the prizes for Best Actor and Best Cinematography, Aleksei Popogrebski’s How I Ended This Summer. I would have bet also on the screening of Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern’s Mammuth, which has premiered at Berlin, but they are still not to be found on the list. There are still quite a few important international names to be found in festival, such as Mika Kaurismaki, with his latest film, the mysterious Hadewijch by Bruno Dumont, the latest Cristophe Honoré, a film directed by the prolific Japanese actor Koji Yakusho, Lee Daniels’ independent drama Precious, two films by François Ozon, the latest (harshly criticized) film by Harmony Korine, another film from the director of the extravagant Taxidermia, György Pálfi, and the list is still far from being complete.
Cum mi-am petrecut sfârºitul verii, regia Aleksei Popogrebski
Obviously, the biggest name on the list of the guests this year is the German director Wim Wenders, present at the TIFF with three of his lesser-known films. The rumors about other similarly famous guests proved to be, for now, just rumors. On the other hand, unlike the Palm d’Or director of Paris, Texas, the directors whose movies are in competition are mostly at their first feature film and generally unknown to the TIFF audiences, with the notable exception of Daniel Sanchez Arevalo, who already won an Audience Award with his Azul oscuro casi negro at TIFF back in 2007. You can almost tell from the variety of styles shown in the available trailers on YouTube that most of them have just completed their first directorial effort; at first sight, the most promising seem to be Urszula Antoniak’s Nothing Personal (for the rich use of colors and cinematography) and the Polish Reverse (this time, for the black-and-white cinematography); anyhow, there should be an equivalent of “You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover” applied to film…
It’s clear that TIFF gets to be more open to various types of public, if you pay attention to the latest projects started by its staff. Of course, one of the most ambitious concerns the screenings in the central square of Cluj, meant to attract wider audiences towards good film, but there is also a contest specially designed for the amateur and professional filmmakers living in Cluj, supported by the local art center, Fabrica de Pensule, and created for the sole purpose of giving a chance to fresh new voices to be discovered through this alternative competition, whose jury is composed of important names of the Romanian cinema and arts. These are just two of the new projects of a festival that’s getting, as it draws closer to its first decade of existence, more ambitious and interesting.
