Debut features by Romania’s Octavian Saramet, Bulgaria’s Martin Iliev and Ukraine’s Iryna Asonova are among 10 projects selected to be presented at Transilvania Pitch Stop (TPS) during the 25th edition of the Transilvania International Film Festival (June 12-21).
Writer-director Saramet’s Sun Offspring is inspired by true events surrounding a controversial wellness community in Romania from the early 2000s. It centres on two lovers drawn into this closed world with daily life reshaped around the idea that birth can happen before conception.
According to the film’s producer Mara Cracaleanu of the Romanian-UK company Melancholia Pictures, Sun Offspring is “a rare project for the Romanian and SEE landscape – an auteur-driven folk horror rooted in local spiritual practices, fertility anxieties, and the legacy of collective belief systems.”
The project has previously been pitched at events such as the European Genre Forum and Sitges Fanpitch, where it reportedly attracted early interest from US and European sales and production partners.
Iliev will be coming to Cluj to present his debut feature Fathers whose storyline is deeply rooted in the director’s own life and the strained relationship with his father.
The production by Angel Ivanov of Sofia-based Handplayed was pitched at this year’s Sofia Meetings in March, when it was presented with the Artekino International Award.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian writer-director-producer Asonova will be pitching her debut feature The Silent Shore, which is described as “a story of resilience, art and memory shaped by war and displacement” set between Ukraine, Poland and Latvia.
The co-production between Ukraine’s Constant Production, Latvia’s Film Angels Studios and Brazil’s Driven Equation was named as one of the best pitches at the Warsaw Industry Days’ Co-production Forum last October.
The TPS line-up also sees two other local Romanian projects selected to be presented in Cluj to an audience of sales agents, co-producers and festival programmers.
After working as DoP on such films as Adventures Italian Style, Adrian Silisteanu will be joined by Domestic Film’s Iriana Adnana to present his debut feature Another Story About My Son which also has Viktoria World Sales and Distribution onboard as a partner.
Silisteanu, who was a co-founder of production company 4 Proof Film with director Adrian Sitaru and actor Adrian Titieni in 2007, had also turned his hand at directing short films alongside his work behind the camera, including Written/Unwritten which was nominated for the European Film Awards in 2017.
Atelier de Film’s Gabriela Suciu will be coming back to TPS with Matei Lucaci-Grünberg’s debut feature Decebal’s Wedding after having pitched Andreea Bortun’s A River’s Gaze at the co-production forum in 2020.
Lucaci-Grünberg’s screenplay, co-written with actor Eduard Buhac (RRR), centres on the title character who left Romania eight years ago and has his family back home attend his wedding in New York only virtually via Skype.
Meanwhile, Turkey will be represented in TPS’ 2026 line-up by three women filmmakers with their feature projects.
Belkis Bayrak’s second feature, drama A Brighter Word Than Bright, comes after her acclaimed debut Gulizar and is currently structured as an international co-production between Turkey, France and Kosovo, while film editor Selda Taskin will be pitching her directorial debut The Guardians Of The Old Lady which has Motiva Film and Sezzfilm joined by Berlin-based Schiwago Film as a production partner.
Producer Aysun Karaman of Rename Media and writer-director Zeynep Köprülü will be in Cluj with her second feature Rain Country, a coming-of-age story set in Istanbul in 2002 just before the political shift that shaped today’s Turkey.
The 2026 line-up of projects is completed by Ukrainian director Philip Sotnychenko’s second feature Times New Roman which is set against the backdrop of the Russian invasion, and the debut feature Colors Of Freedom by the Hungarian actor Kristóf Zsolt Tóth who won the award for the Most Promising Director under 30 at last year’s Budapest International Short Film Festival for his shorts Across and Denisa.
At the same time, this year’s Romanian Days competition will feature films which had been pitched as projects at past editions of TPS – Valeriu Andriuță’s The Circle and Andreea Borțun’s A River’s Gaze – as well as films that had their world premieres at international film festivals over the past year, such as Mihai Mincan’s Milk Teeth, Maria Popistașu and Alex Baciu’s Y and Andrei Epure’s Don’t Let Me Die.
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