As every year, TIFF serves as a breeding ground for the latest Romanian films, whether features or shorts, documentaries or fiction, emerging names or established auteurs. But what trends and tendencies define this year's selection?
Romanian Days kicks off today, marking one of the most energetic stretches of TIFF — because, after all, there’s no place like home for making films. This year, the section feels particularly intriguing, packed with all sorts of cinematic challenges. In the Romanian Film Days Competition, five male directors and four female directors — a fairly balanced split that speaks to the growing presence of women’s directorial voices in Romania — have put their films in the ring. What's most striking about the competition (as well as the out-of-competition selections) is the dominance of documentary. Aside from the already known The New Year That Never Was and the thriller Traffic (written by Cristian Mungiu and directed by Teodora Ana Mihai), the entire competition line-up consists of non-fiction efforts, including the masterfully edited Triton and the powerful portrait of a Roma community in Beyond the River. This documentary trend holds strong outside the competition too, with a score of 5 to 3 — although TWST by Andrei Ujică and Sleep #2 by Radu Jude blur the lines between documentary and fiction. Alongside Sleep #2, Radu Jude also brings his Berlinale-awarded Kontinental ’25 for its national premiere at ZFR, just before its theatrical release this Friday.
What ties together this sea of documentaries seems to be a shared social consciousness — one attuned to injustice, alert to even the smallest forms of violence, and driven to instigate change. From the more intimate, socially-tinged interpersonal stories of Love Hurts and Dad, to the more overtly political ones like A Bright Future and Beyond the River, these directorial visions sketch a landscape of uncertainty, rendered with both sharpness and tenderness — a terrain worth surveying carefully and transforming urgently. A special mention goes to the informal “forest double feature”: The Spruce Forest and After the Stumps. On one hand, Tudor Giurgiu’s new documentary reconstructs and interrogates testimonies of the traumatic Soviet occupation of Bessarabia in 1941. On the other, a film following the fallout of a 2021 incident — when two journalists and an environmental activist were beaten by the so-called “Timber Mafia” — reminds us that threats don't always come from beyond the borders.
Capping off the ZFR selection are four knock-out short film programs, shifting abruptly from family dramas with (like Octopus) or without (Cookies and Milk) fantastical elements, to stop-motion (Anchor) and 2D animations (Grandpa's Sleeping). The directions are varied, eclectic, and bursting with youthful flair — ranging from recipes of the Romanian New Wave to a form-consciousness tinged with (positive!) kitsch. Where all these directions might lead remains to be seen.