“This year’s lineup is a mix as polarising as the world it comes from. Stark black-and-white minimalism and an overdose of blood and psychedelic colour. True stories and the wildest fabrications. Genre films flirted with, or genre films thrown into an orgiastic blender. Heroes, anti-heroes. A straight line and a Möbius strip. Political satire and loony porn. Absent fathers, eccentric mothers — or the other way around. Think of it as a game of Jenga where every film is a structural piece. Pull any one out and the whole thing collapses. Together they hold, but the instability is suffocating.”
— Mihai Chirilov, Transilvania IFF Artistic Director
The Official Competition Films:
Sicko (dir. Aitore Zholdaskali, Kazakhstan) - a cynical, hard-boiled debut from the kazakh director, already a box-office hit in his home country;
Feels Like Home (dir. Gábor Holtai, Hungary) - a claustrophobic debut in which family functions as the amniotic fluid required to force a human being into existence;
Le Roi Soleil (No One Will Know) (dir. Vincent Maël Cardona, France) - a slick, high-concept collision of heist movie and slasher, centred on a winning lottery ticket and driven by the kind of greed that can only end badly;
A Useful Ghost (dir. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, France) - anarchic and oddly tender, the film uses absurdism to ask serious questions about love and the wrongs we leave unaddressed;
Lionel (dir. Carlos Saiz, Spain) - an experiment on both sides of the lens: a road movie built around a script the cast never saw, yet one that arrives at a universal truth about fathers and sons;
The Night is Fading Away (dir. Ezequiel Salinas, Ramiro Sonzini, Argentina) - a bittersweet love letter to cinema, in which a displaced projectionist takes a job as a night watchman at a cinema and gradually builds an unlikely community around old films;
Truly Naked (dir. Muriel d’Ansembourg, Netherlands) – the film makes nudity and sex matter-of-fact, then pivots to the harder question: whether shedding your clothes is the same as opening yourself up;
Titanic Ocean (dir. Konstantina Kotzamani, Greece) – the film follows young women training to become professional mermaids in a world that never stops demanding reinvention.
Butterfly (dir. Itonje Søimer Guttormsen, Norway) – the story tracks two sisters working through the long shadow of a guru mother, with self-knowledge serving as the film’s uneasy currency;
My Father's Shadow (dir. Akinola Davies jr, UK) – the film operates as a dream-memory of a political turning point and how it echoes through one family across generations;
Our Father (dir. Goran Stankovic, Serbia) – the film examines the cult of a surrogate patriarch at a Serbian monastery for recovering addicts, and the difficulty of dismantling something that can’t be entirely condemned;
The Red Hangar (dir. Juan Pablo Sallato, Chile) - a lean, pressure-cooker thriller about honour and duty during the Pinochet coup, remarkable for how much it achieves with limited means;