The latest best films worldwide are coming in 2017 to the Transylvania International Film Festival, whose 16th edition will take place between the 2nd and the 11th of June.
Awarded in important festivals or included in the critics’ end of year tops, the first titles coming in the festival’s programme announce an eclectic selection, with films tackling the moment’s hot themes – politics, religion, society – and also films with a great audience appeal.
In the annual best of of the
Supernova section will be screened productions launched in Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno, Karlovy Vary or Toronto, some of them different countries’ Oscar entries. Among the first confirmed titles is
Neruda by Pablo Larrain (
No,
El Club,
Jackie), an unconventional biopic inspired by the true story of the Nobel prize winning poet, Pablo Neruda, persecuted by the communist regime of Gabriel Gonzales Videla, after publicly criticizing it in 1948, having Gabriel Garcia Bernal at his best. Also a Nobel prize winner is the hero of a black comedy, Argentina’s
proposal for the Oscars,
El ciudadano ilustre / The Distinguished citizen (directed by Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn). A famous writer accepts the invitation to visit his native town in Argentina, source of inspiration of all of his novels.
The wrong man in the wrong place, here we have the source of a sparkling comedy,
Ministry of Love (directed by Pavo Marinkovic), in which a Croatian biologist is faced with an unpleasant national mission: to verify who of the war widows have found themselves a lover and thus shouldn’t enjoy their war widow allowances anymore.
A tribute paid to Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, the comedy
Paris, pieds nus / Lost in Paris has as protagonists the film directors, Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, alongside the veteran Emmanuelle Riva. A 93 years old auntie disappears without trace and her niece and a homeless guy look for her all around Paris, which is a sure occasion for jokes and perfectly matched coincidences that remind of the mute comedies.
From Cannes/Un Certain Regard comes
The Student/(M)ucenicul by Kirill Serebrennikov (
Betrayal), a disturbing film about a teenager in Russia who becomes a radical orthodox and contests, Bible in hand, all that happens around him.
The Union Plaza in Cluj will host, as it does each year, some of the most spectacular TIFF screenings. The big winner of the Transylvania Trophy
with
Stockholm, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, comes back this year with a thriller on the edge,
Que Dios Nos Perdone / May God Save Us, about two policemen whose actions become almost as suspect, to say the least, as the serial killer’s they are pursuing.
Totally different from the rest, the exuberant
La pazza gioia / Like Crazy (directed by Paolo Virzi) follows the emotional, full of surprises friendship between two women that meet in a psychiatric clinic.
Unpredictable and provocative the pics in the
What’s Up Doc? section bring to the front present day dilemmas
. La Libertad del Diablo / Devil’s Freedom (directed by Everardo Gonzales) freshly screened in the Berlinale, is an impressive introspection into the dramas from beyond figures. Only in the last five years, the drugs war produced over 100 000 deaths and missing in Mexico. In
Austerlitz, selected in Venice, the Ukrainean director Sergei Loznitsa shoots in B/W the tourists visiting the concentration camps.
The borderline between fiction and documentary is erased in the uber-stylized
All These Sleepless Nights (directed by Michal Marczak) who follows the night life of two young people in Warsaw and, by extension, the existential drift of the Facebook generation.
Details at:
www.tiff.ro
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