Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel’s second feature To A Land Unknown added to its long list of prizes when it received the €10,000 Transilvania Trophy of this year’s Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) in Romania at the weekend.
Berlin-based Noaz Deshe won the €3,500 best director prize for his second feature Xoftex, which had its world premiere at last year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
The special jury prize went to Chinese-American filmmaker Julian Castronovo’s first film Debut (or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued) which investigates the ethics and aesthetics of forgery, while the best performance award was presented to Ghjuvanna Benedetti for her role in Julien Colonna’s The Kingdom as a teenager growing up in the violent shadow of her mafia father in 1990s Corsica.
The award in the What’s Up, Doc competition dedicated to films that also play with the conventions of documentary cinema, was won by Spanish director Daniel Tornero for his film Saturn which focuses on his family dealing with the emotional fallout of having grown up with a grandfather as a father figure who had been arrested in 2018 for child abuse and attempted kidnapping.
The jury, whose members included Warner Discovery Europe executive Hanka Kastelicová and FIPADOC’s managing and artistic director Christine Camdessus also made special mentions of the Azerbaijani director Orkhan Aghazadeh’s The Return Of The Projectionist and Indian filmmaker Arjun Talwar’s Letters From Wolf Street.
Bogdan Mureșanu’s debut feature The New Year That Never Came, set on the eve of the 1989 Romanian revolution, won the best feature award in the Romanian Days Competition and also picked up the Vodafone Hearts’ Award as the most popular Romanian film at the festival. The film had dominated Romania’s prestigious Gopo awards at the end of April, winning 10 prizes.
The New Year That Never Came premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section last year where it had begun its successful run by receiving the prize for best film.
Meanwhile, the Romanian Days debut award went to Andra MacMasters’ documentary Bright Future about a youth festival held in North Korea in 1989 at a pivotal moment in history. The Romanian-South Korean co-production had its world premiere at International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) last November and is being handled internationally by Syndicado Film Sales.
Spanish director Eva Libertad García López’s Deaf won the audience award of the official competition.
In addition, the jury for the newly created TEEN Spirit section’s competition gave their prize to the Slovenian director Urška Djukić debut feature Little Trouble Girls which had its world premiere in the Berlinale’s new competition Perspectives in February.
The awards ceremony in the Romanian National Opera’s historic theatre featured the presentation of three lifetime achievement awards - to the Romanian actress Emilia Dobrin, veteran film critic Valerian Sava, and Hungarian director Béla Tarr. It also handed out excellency award to Romanian writer-director Andrei Ujica (The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu, TWIST), and the Transilvania Trophy for special contribution to world cinema to the Portuguese actress-singer-director Maria de Medeiros.
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