Dedicated to 1st and 2nd time directors, the international competitions of the 23rd Transilvania International Film Festival (Cluj-Napoca, June 14-24, 2024) have been announced. 12 productions are running for the Transilvania Trophy and the other awards of the Official Competition, while 10 documentaries will compete for the What’s Up, Doc? award.
"The films of the Official Competition tell stories about atypical characters, their reactions to social pressures and the need for connection, affirmation, or independence. Intimate dramas, absurd comedies, unconventional melodramas or family chronicles of different calibers, with a slight predilection for stories of young people at crossroads." (Mihai Chirilov, artistic director, Transilvania IFF)
After winning the directing award at the previous edition of Transilvania IFF with Charcoal, Brazilian director Carolina Markowicz returns to the Official Competition with Toll, a film about a mother whose love for her son is so great that she will do anything to raise money to send him to a "healing" camp for homosexuality.
In another corner of the world, in India, the protagonist of The Adamant Girl (r. PS Vinothraj, previously awarded at Transilvania IFF for his debut Pebbles) also struggles with an absurd situation due to the deeply patriarchal society that cannot conceive that a young woman could decide whom to love. Also from India, Girls Will Be Girls (r. Shuchi Talati) is a coming-of-age story of a teenager from a Himalayan boarding school whose mother seems to have not experienced maturity herself.
Winner of the Big Screen competition at the Rotterdam Festival, The Old Bachelor (r. Oktay Baraheni) is a chamber family drama of Shakespearean proportions, where the cause of the problems is the same patriarchal world (this time, Iran) that doesn't know how or doesn't want to function differently.
Summer Brother (r. Joren Molter, Netherlands) is a sharp debut about an apparently hopeless family and the youngest son forced to grow up suddenly to save himself. The theme of adolescence and family is also explored in The Other Son (r. Juan Sebastián Quebrada, Colombia), in which a young man tries to make peace with his brother's death and find a way to continue his life.
Inspired by the stories of migrants who left Andalusia for Catalonia, Permanent Picture (r. Laura Ferrés, Spain) is a fascinating blend of comedy, realism, and melodrama in which a casting director wanders the outskirts of Barcelona in search of "normal" faces for the image campaign of a political party.
The Dreamer (r. Anaïs Tellenne, France) is a fairy tale about the unforeseen power of art. Raphael, a golem-like man, without an eye, lives with his mother and takes care of an abandoned mansion. The appearance of the domain's heiress, an eccentric artist, will disrupt his existence.
A meditation on art, but also a corrosive study of a radical identity crisis, in Daniel Auerbach (Israel) David Volach plays his own role, that of a director stuck in pre-production of his new film after the success of his debut. Crossing the destinies and trajectories of several seemingly disparate characters, Day Tripper (r. Yanqi Chen) is a delicious mix of Kaurismaki and Roy Andersson, and, at the same time, an unexpectedly acidic and comic chronicle of today's China. In the same satirical vein, but with an extra shot of vitriol, The Hypnosis (r. Ernst de Geer, Sweden) is about an apparently perfect couple whose marital balance is ruined after one of them undergoes a hypnosis session to quit smoking but instead begins to shed inhibitions.
Directed by Cătălin Rotaru and Gabi Virginia Șarga, the only Romanian film in the Official Competition is a detonating cocktail of genres, mixing black comedy with melodrama and frequently playing with the absurd. Where Elephants Go is the story of an unlikely friendship between two nonconformist heroes - Leni, a feisty and energetic 9-year-old girl, and Marcel, a homeless, agitated, and mocking young man - both facing difficult moments in life.