European sales executives from companies including mk2, Le Pacte, Urban Sales, Goodfellas. M-Appeal, Heretic and Bendita Film Sales, are in Cluj to attend RO Days, the industry platform of the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) in Romania this week.
The RO Days programmes are highly attractive launchpads for the region’s filmmakers and the submissions reached record levels this year, according to Ami Geger, TIFF’s new head of industry.
”We had 56 applications for Transilvania Pitch Stop [TPS], up from 40 last year, a record,” she explains.
Previous editions of TPS, the centrepiece strand of RO Days, have showcased projects including Christos Nikou’s Apples, Maksym Nakonetschny’s Butterfly Vision, Mihai Mincan’s To The North, Elif Sözen’s Veha and Gabi Sarga and Catalin Rotaru’s Where Elephants Go.
This year it will present 10 feature projects by first and second-time filmmakers from Romania and the countries around Romania, at a pitching session on June 18.
“The lineup spans road movies, coming-of-age stories, political dramas, genre experiments, and dark comedies that explore friendship, repression, social hypocrisy, and the power of fiction through distinctive, unconventional voices,” Geger says.
This year’s selection includes three debuts by Romanian filmmakers, Octavian Șaramet (Sun Offspring), Adrian Silișteanu (Another Story About My Son) and Matei Lucaci-Grünberg (Decebal’s Wedding), projects by Turkish women filmmakers including Zeynep Köprülü’s coming-of-age story Rain Country and Selda Taskin’s directorial debut The Guardians Of The Old Lady, and Ukrainian director Philip Sotnychenko’s second feature Times New Roman.
French producer Guillaume de Seille of Arizona Productions and Slovenia’s Alwes Pavlin of Perfo Film are among the TPS regulars who will be in Cluj as potential co-producers for this year’s projects.
De Seille served as co-producer on the Russian co-directors Aleksey Chupov and Natasha Merkulova’s The Man Who Surprised Everyone which was presented at TPS in 2017 and Turkish director Selman Nacar’s debut Between Two Dawns in 2019; Pavlin became one of the production partners of Nikou’s Apples, also pitched at TPS in 2017, and co-produced Romanian filmmaker Andreea Cristina Bortun’s A River’s Gaze, which was one of the TPS award-winners at its 2020 edition.
Among the first-time attendees at this year’s edition are Carey Born of the UK’s First Born Films, Simone Catania of Italy’s Indyca, Alse Gelze of Latvia’s Tasse Film, and Olmo Figueredo of La Claqueta from Spain.
While the RO Days’ Drama Room programme and its new initiative Book to Screen are targeted specifically at the local Romanian industry, the Transilvania Talent Lab training initiative for emerging filmmakers from Romania and Moldova has been expanded this year to accept a director from Spain as part of a relationship being forged with Barcelona’s D’A Film Lab.
Works in progress
Geger has also transformed the previous Closed Screenings section of new Romanian films into a Works-in-Progress showcase as an invitation-only event on June 19 for sales agents, distributors and festival programmers.
Among the seven projects presenting 15-20 minutes of footage are UK-Romanian brothers Anton and Danian Groves’ debut feature, King Wray, about a toxic father-son dynamic fuelling a rock star’s comeback and Ligia Ciornei’s Grounded, a blend of documentary reality and fiction centring on three women from three different worlds whose lives come together at the Romanian-Ukrainian border.
RO Days is taking place from June 17-21.
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