TIFF your way to Cluj-Napoca

The 22nd edition of the Transilvania International Film Festival will take place in Cluj-Napoca from June 9-18. BR asked the TIFF management team about the special things they have in store for this edition.

By Oana Vasiliu

The highlights of this year’s festival will be a new film from Lars Von Trier—Riget Exodus/The Kingdom Exodus (Denmark, 2022), the third part of the cult horror trilogy—and Fatih Akin’s Rheingold (Germany, 2022), inspired by the life of rapper Xatar. Both films were winners at the Venice and Locarno festivals. There’s also the long-awaited Tár, with Cate Blanchett in the leading role, as well as La syndicaliste (dir. Jean-Paul Salomé, France, 2022), the new film starring Isabelle Huppert.

TIFF has also announced Nordic Focus, the most complex programme of its kind in the festival’s history, dedicated to a rich, diverse, and innovative European cinematography coming from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Iceland. The programme is the result of a collaboration with the Göteborg Film Festival and film institutes in all five countries.

Retrospectives

Founder of the French New Wave and radical film critic and intellectual, director Jean-Luc Godard (1930 – 2022) will be celebrated at the 22nd edition of Transilvania International Film Festival. Eight of his highly acclaimed films will be screened as part of a special retrospective, Close-up Jean-Luc Godard, organised with the support of the French Institute of Romania.

The festival will also take us on a journey into the cinematic universe of one of the most prolific American directors of the modern period, Sidney Lumet (1924 – 2011), with six restored works. The programme is inspired by the retrospective dedicated to the same director by the Lumière Film Festival (Lyon, France) in 2022, a cinephile event par excellence that celebrates classic cinema by presenting restored versions of masterpieces and tributes to legendary directors.

MUSIC

Courtesy of TIFF, electronic music band

Tangerine Dream will hold its first concert in Romania. Over the past 50 years, the band has released over 100 studio albums and is a seven-time nominee of the Grammy Awards Tangerine Dream has created over 60 film soundtracks, including Ridley Scott's Legend (1985), William Friedkin's thriller Sorcerer (1977), and Michael Mann’s neo-noir Thief (1981). This year’s TIFF concerts will also include a special show by Swedish-British artist Jay-Jay Johanson, who will perform at Bontida during an event dedicated to Swedish music and film. Known for his melancholic voice and hits such as On the Radio, She Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone, Johanson is considered to be one of the most influential electro artists of his generation.

TUDOR GIURGIU, PRESIDENT OF TIFF

“We’ll open TIFF.22 with an excellent comedy about the fear of flying—Northern Comfort. It is the first English-language film by Icelandic director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, a regular at our festival, who thus also inaugurates Nordic Focus, a large section of this edition that will bring to Cluj over 40 films, concerts, and dinner-concerts from the Nordic countries. From this year's programme, I would also recommend the dinner-concert A bomb was stolen, an event that marks 100 years since the birth of our great Ion Popescu-Gopo. The production is Gopo's feature film debut and was presented in competition at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. At TIFF, it will be screened both in its original form and with a new soundtrack that was specially created for this event by composer Alexei Turcan and performed live by artists from Cluj-Napoca, members of the Romanian Cinema Orchestra, under the baton of conductor Tiberiu Soare.”

OANA BUJGOI GIURGIU, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF TIFF

“On June 10, the first Saturday of the festival, Icelandic-British artist Jay Jay Johanson will perform at the Banffy Castle in Bontida. His concert will be followed by the screening of a documentary that serves as a history lesson: And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine (d. Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck, Sweden, 2023). An impressive and terrifyingly inventive collage, the film brings two centuries of imagery to the screen, from the first photograph in history to the advent of cinema and the lightning-fast evolution of television, to today's technology, when everyone is a potential content creator. And we should definitely meet again at The Phantom Carriage dinner-concert. It is an original production of the festival, which invited Icelandic artist Barði Jóhannsson to compose and perform together with female post-punk trio Kælan Mikla, a new score for this classic of world cinema. The Phantom Carriage is particularly important in film history due to its artistic innovations and major influence on directors such as Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick.”

MIHAI CHIRILOV, TIFF ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

“If you’re going to watch just one title from the Sidney Lumet retrospective, go for his terrific masterpiece from the 70s, Network, and check out its prophetic and satirical power that’s still intact 50 years later, especially in these convoluted times driven by crass media manipulation. TV series fans should definitely give five hours of their lives for a binging immersion in the last instalment of Lars von Trier’s trilogy The Kingdom, called Exodus, and its Twin Peaks-like creepy mood. It doesn’t matter if you’re not familiar with the first two seasons of this unique supernatural black comedy set in a hospital possessed by spooky demons and bureaucratic minds. Von Trier perfectly knows how to grab his audience by the throat and mess with everyone’s idea about good and evil coexisting, this time blending in the surreal mix of characters played by the likes of Alexander Skarsgard and Willem Dafoe.”