The TIFF.25 What’s Up, Doc? Competition

Now in its fifth year as a dedicated competition within Transilvania IFF, the What’s Up, Doc? section brings together ten titles that span the full range of what documentary can be: alongside straight-format films, this year’s selection takes in a coyote animation, a poetic hybrid, a model of investigative journalism, and a tongue-in-cheek B-movie series.

“For all their geographic range — from America to Morocco, Mexico to South Africa, the former Soviet Union to present-day Israel — the films in competition (eight of them debuts) keep returning to the same ground: love, the need for closeness, and above all, Truth. The place where differences dissolve and only human experience remains, in all its ambiguity 

- Crăița Nanu, What’s Up, Doc? Curator

The What’s Up Doc? films:

• We Were Left Alone (dir. Adrián Canoura, Spain) - a son’s letter to his sailor father — formally unusual, repetitive by design, part experimental film and part immersive installation: love rendered through absence, forgiveness rendered through form;
• Goodbye Sisters (dir. Alexander Murphy, France) - a film that manages to be both painterly and clear-eyed about family and fate;
• Bouchra (dir. Orian Yani Barki, Meriem Bennani, USA) - a coming-out story told with disarming honesty and transformed into a distinctive animated film;
• Motel Paraiso (dir. Jose Eduardo Castilla Ponce, Mexico) - takes an equally playful approach, casting a pair of eccentric grandparents as the unwitting stars of their own B-movie franchise, with warmth and genuine comic invention;
• Hex (dir. Maja Holand, Norway) - the true story of three friends who vow to become famous as witches and a heavy metal band;
• Variations on a Theme (dir. Jason Jacobs, Devon Delmar, South Africa) - a hybrid part poem, part excavation, set in South Africa, tracing how betrayal, buried under years of silence, continues to travel across generations;
• Of Mud And Blood (dir. Jean-Gabriel Leynaud, France) – a story of exploitation set in the Congo, with a Steinbeckian eye for the smallness of dreams against the large scale of abuse;
• The Seoul Guardians (dir. Kim Jong-Woo, Kim Shin-Wan, Cho Chul-Young, South Korea) - a live-action reminder that democratic power is never more than one crowd’s determination;
• Memory (dir. Vladlena Sandu, France) - a quietly astonishing walk through one child’s experience of the Soviet collapse and a family stretched between Chechnya and Crimea;
• Far From Maine (dir. Roy Cohen, France) - one of the most rigorous and genuinely open-handed arguments for peace in recent documentary cinema;