This year Mexican-born director, screenwriter and producer Michel Franco will be at Transilvania IFF.22 as part of the jury for the official competition, and his latest film, Sundown (2021), reuniting Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg, is part of the festival programme.
Michel Franco's name carries weight in the contemporary cinema world due the thematic polymorphism he delivers, articulating contemporary issues that life, from time to time, throws at us in all sorts of ways. He has won awards at Cannes for three of his dramas, After Lucia (2012), Chronic (2015) and April's Daughter (2017), and at Transilvania IFF.22, we will enjoy his presence as a juror in the Official Competition.
Born on August 28, 1979, the Mexican-born director, screenwriter and producer has, in less than 20 years, managed to articulate his own niche, exploring far-flung spaces of cinema, from his 2009 debut film Daniel & Ana (charting a foray into a family's disintegration) to his most recent production, Sundown, 2021, to be screened at Transilvania IFF.22. His early interactions with cinema, as he reminisces in an interview with Senses of Cinema, marked his process of becoming familiar with renowned directors Stanley Kubrick and Luis Buñuel, who caught him on this cinematic roller coaster.
Although he dreamed of a career as a musician, Franco quickly gave up on that thought, enthusiastically reorienting himself towards cinema, which he began diligently exploring at the age of 19. Individualizing his style over the course of his career, as he became more and more experienced, he talks about his visual toolkit saying, “I no longer try to impose an aesthetic on a film. At the beginning of my career, I had more rules, now I'm very relaxed. I used to have more cinematic references, now I don't have any. I borrow more from books than films. In a way, the aesthetic of my films is very close to my way of being”. Asked if he sees his characters as vulnerable beings, Franco says that the protagonists of any good book or film should not lack a touch of sensitivity that ultimately determines the authenticity of the narrative.
This is also true of his latest film, Sundown, scheduled at the Florin Piersic Cinema on Monday, June 12, where Tim Roth and Charlotte Gainsbourg are playing a couple during their idyllic holiday in Acapulco that is suddenly interrupted by a catastrophic event. Franco tries, by recurring to subjects we face in our everyday lives, to build a believable, purposeful landscape: “Every time I make a film, when I write, there has to be something specific. I'm the one who makes the choices. I think it's important for each viewer to see themselves reflected in the characters I bring to the screen, as we start sharing, both those in front of the screen and those behind it, common feelings and experiences”.
During his visit at Transilvania IFF, Michel Franco will also hold a masterclass on filmmaking for film students in Cluj-Napoca.