The 25th edition of the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF, 12-21 June 2026) in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, has unveiled the line-ups for this year’s Official and Documentary Competitions.
Twelve films by first and second-time directors will be competing for the €10,000 Transilvania trophy and further awards in the Official Competition.
The debuts comprise Hungarian director-sound engineer-composer Gábor Holtai’s Feels Like Home, British-Nigerian Akinola Davies Jr’s My Father’s Shadow, London Film School graduate Muriel d’Ansembourg’s Truly Naked, Spanish director Carlos Saiz’s Lionel, Argentinian co-directors Ezequiel Salinas and Ramiro Sonzini’s The Night Is Fading Away, Thai writer-director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost, Serbian Goran Stankovic’s Our Father and Chilean producer-director-screenwriter Juan Pablo Sallato’s The Red Hangar.
Also in the running are Sicko, the first solo directorial outing by Kazakhstan’s Aitore Zholdaskali, and Greek writer-director Konstantina Kotzamani’s debut feature Titanic Ocean, which will have its world premiere in Cannes Un Certain Regard. They join the second features Butterfly from the Norwegian writer-director Itonje Søimer Guttormsen and No One Will Know from French actor-director Vincent Maël Cardona.
What’s Up Doc? Competition
Meanwhile, 10 works pushing the boundaries of the documentary form will be in the running for the What’s Up Doc? section’s top cash prize of €2,000.
The competing films range from Spanish filmmaker Adrián Canoura’s debut We Were Left Alone and South African co-writer/director team Jason Jacobs and Devon Delmar’s hybrid part poem, part excavation Variations on a Theme through French-Irish director Alexander Murphy’s family story set in the Himalayas Goodbye Sisters and Norwegian director-cinematographer Maja Holand’s portrait of the Witch Club Satan metal band in Hex, to Mexican director Jose Eduardo Castilla Ponce’s blend of reality and fiction in his debut feature documentary Motel Paraiso.
Further debuts selected for this competition are Memory by Crimea-born Vladlena Sandu, Bouchra by the acclaimed visual artists Meriam Bennani and Orian Barki and Of Blood and Mud by the French cinematographer-director Jea-Gabriel Leynaud.
In addition, South Korean filmmakers Kim Jong-Woo, Kim Shin-Wan, Cho Chul-Young have been selected with The Seoul Guardians, chronicling contemporary political history in their country, while the Arab-Jewish queer filmmaker and activist Roy Cohen will be in Cluj-Napoca with Far From Maine, his personal cinematic letter to a Palestinian friend from his youth who was killed by Israeli police in 2000.
TIFF.25’s film programme also includes previews of Radu Jude’s Diary Of A Chambermaid, which is having its world premiere in this year’s Directors’ Fortnight, and Pedro Almodovar’s Cannes competition entry Bitter Christmas before their theatrical releases in Romania by Independenta Film.
Furthermore, TIFF audiences will be treated to screenings of films as diverse as Maryam Touzani’s Venice audience award winner Calle Malaga, Juliette Binoche’s directorial debut In-I In Motion, Lance Hammer’s Silver Bear winner Queen At Sea, Gabriele Muccino’s melodrama The Things Left Unspoken, Lee Sang-il’s Japanese box-office hit Kokuho, and Teona Strugar Mitevska’s drama Mother.
This year’s festival, which is organized by the Romanian Film Promotion Association and the Transilvania Film Festival Association, will also feature a complete retrospective of Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu’s seven feature films - from his debut 12:08 East of Bucharest to 2019’s La Gomera - as well as two shorts and one medium-length film made during and immediately after his studies at the National University of Film and Theatre UNATC in Bucharest.
Porumboiu, who has been a regular visitor with his films to the festival in past years and won the Transilvania trophy on two occasions in 2006 and 2008, will receive the TIFF.25 Special Award and give a masterclass.
In addition, this year will see the festival partnering for the first time with the Los Angeles-based organisation Film Independent to organise the Always Remember free film series to raise Holocaust awareness. There will be screenings of Lucija Stojević’s documentary Pepi Fandango and Hungarian director László Nemes’ third feature film Orphan.
The Official Competition’s jury will include the Polish distributor-producer-festival founder Roman Gutek, who will also be the first recipient of the Janovics Jenő award created for TIFF’s 25th anniversary edition in memory of the Transylvanian film pioneer and one of the first screenwriter-producers in the Austro-Hungarian Empire who discovered talents including Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda.
TIFF’s artistic director, Mihai Chirilov, said in a statement this year’s line-up is “a mix as polarising as the world it comes from”.
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