Iranian director Dornaz Hajiha’s Like A Fish On The Moon won the Transilvania Trophy, the top prize of the international competition at the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) in Romania at a gala ceremony on Saturday June 17.
Hajiha’s debut feature premiered at in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition in 2022 and is being handled internationally by Hong Kong-based Asian Shadows It also picked up the best performance award for the lead actress Sepidar Tari ex aequo with Nacho Quesada, who plays the lead role in Andrew Sala’s France-Argentina film The Barbarians.
Brazilian director Carolina Markowicz won the best director prize for Charcoal, while Finland’s Tia Kouvo won the special jury prize for her debut film Family Time.
Moldovian director Ion Bors’ debut feature Carbon won the audience award. The dark comedy had been pitched at Transilvania Pitch Stop in 2019 beforer going on to make its world premiere at San Sebastian last year. It is the most successful Moldovan film of all time, outgrossing Avatar, The Way Of Water at the Moldovan box office after eight months on release.
The best feature award in the Romanian Days competition went to Vlad Petri’s Between Revolutions which also took home the Fipresci prize, while Andrei Tanase’s Day Of The Tiger was recognised by the international jury as the best debut from this year’s line-up.
The audience award for the most popular Romanian filmwent to Freedom, the latest feature film by the festival’s president Tudor Giurgiu who also presented his documentary Nasty in RO Days’ Closed Screenings.
Now in its second year, the What’s Up Doc competition saw its main award going to Anhell69 by Colombian filmmaker Theo Montoya.
“My film is a co-production with Romania and when we were editing near Cluj, we joked one day we are going to present the film at Transilvania Film Festival, and so, wow, we did it!”, Montoya said on accepting his prize.
Party until breakfast
Saturday evening’s gala ceremony at the historical National Opera House included the presentation of the excellence award to the veteran Romanian actor Horatiu Malaele and lifetime chievement awards to director Oliver Stone and actor Geoffrey Rush. The traditional closing party at La Villa saw some guests still celebrating at breakfast time on Sunday morning.
Although this year’s festival was often beset by inclement weather which necessitated the organisers having to re-schedule some open air screenings to indoor venues, this drawback did not dampen TIFF’s spirits or the warm welcome that has been offered to guests old and new each year since its founding in 2002 by Giurgiu and Mihai Chirilov.
Initial estimates by organisers suggested attendance figures for the 2023 edition will be up by around 9% on last year’s total of 102,000 tickets sold. This was itself a record that had surpassed the previous record set in 2019.
“TIFF was different this year in one respect,” said artistic director Chirilov. “In previous years, there would be fewer guests at the beginning and then more for the second half during the industry days. But there were lots of filmmakers coming from day one which took us by storm, but in a pleasant way.”
“It was also very interesting for me to see how the classic films we programmed for the Close-Up retrospectives on Sidney Lumet, Jean-Luc Godard and Oliver Stone played with the audiences and their response was a kind of barometer of how they stood the test of time.”
Giurgiu added: “Never in the history of the festival did we have so many important filmmakers, actors and directors here, so it was a real tour de force by the guest and programming departments and festival management. “Many of the first-timers I spoke with praised the festival’s particular spirit that is reflected in the programme as well as the industry activities. The festival has the right size to be sufficiently informal to provide chances for networking, but you also have great films that one could then see after a day’s industry programme is over.”
Preliminary dates for next year’s festival have been set for June 14-23, 2024, at a time when the weather is usually drier. These dates were unavailable this year as all hotel rooms in Cluj were booked up for the UEFA Under 21 Championship which is being held in Georgia and Romania from this week. Two matches - France versus Italy and Norway verus Switzerland are being played in the city’s two football arenas on June 11.
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