The 15th edition of the Transylvania International Film Festival- TIFF has started in Cluj. The festival was opened by the film “6.9 on the Richter scale” screened for the first time in the presence of its director, Nae Caranfil. Also for the first time at TIFF, the film “Dogs”, winner of this year’s critics’ prize at the Cannes Festival, will be screened. Actually this is the only Romanian film signed up for this year’s competition for the “Transylvania Trophy”.
Here is Bogdan Mirică the director and scriptwriter of the film “Dogs”: “The film conveys a feeling of pressure and cooped up tension. My movie is about men who are so caught up in their own manly nature that they don’t realize they are destroying themselves.”
The festival’s weekend schedule has many good films and special events in store for film aficionados. For this year, the organizers have arranged a new outdoor cinema called Someş Open Air. Children and parents alike are expected at the Banffy Castle in Bonţida for two days of workshops, puppet theater shows, sports and games as well as for the premiere of the film “Nelly’s Adventures”, many of this film’s scenes having been shot in Sibiu. A spectacular fireworks show by the French Transe Express is scheduled for Saturday. The show will be followed by a fascinating documentary about the world of circus — “The Show of Shows”, made last year by Benedikt Erlingsson.
On Sunday the music composed by Icelander Bardi Johannsson, performed by the Hungarian Opera Orchestra of Cluj, conducted by Simona Strungaru, will accompany the bizarre images of the film “Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages”, a controversial Swedish silent horror movie of the 1920s. Another two remarkable films have been scheduled for the weekend at the TIFF in the presence of director Sarunas Bartas, a special guest of the Focus Lithuania section: “Few of us” and “Peace to Us in our Dreams”. Actually a mini film retrospective has been dedicated to Sarunas Bartas in the “3×3” section.
Also on Saturday the Romanian astronaut Dumitru Prunariu will attend, at the Students’ Culture House, the special screening of two films “Operation Avalanche” and “8 days in Space”, 35 years after his first flight into the Outer Space. The Japanese director Sion Sono, to whom TIFF has dedicated a large-scale retrospective, will meet with the audience after the screening of the films “Guilty of Romance” and “Tag”.
TIFF music Nights will start with two popular Romanian bands: “The Mono Jacks” and “Byron”.At this year’s edition of the TIFF, actress Sophia Loren, who came to Romania for the first time, will receive the Lifetxcime Achievement Award.
