Romanian film review – TIFF’s Most Memorable

The 18th edition of Romania’s biggest film festival kicks off on Friday, May 31, and until the reviews and opinions start pouring in and the winners are announced at the end of next week, here are some of the most interesting movies shown and/or awarded during its previous editions, to get you in the mood.

Transilvania International Film Festival, or simply TIFF, is one of the most important international film festivals in the region and has been growing steadily and rapidly. Its section dedicated to national cinema, the Romanian Film Days, gathers most of the festival’s guests and regular audience members, making it an ever sold-out, buzzing event showcasing most titles from the previous or recent year, and (most excitingly) many premieres. To list all the awards, or the most well-known productions even, is an impossible task within the frame of this review, so here is a purely subjective selection of the films I found most memorable in the past few years.

Last year’s winner, Constantin Popescu’s Pororoca (2017) is a shattering tale of a child gone missing and the disintegration of its parents, particularly the father’s, and is carried by impressive, fearless acting. Anything shown by Radu Jude, whether The Dead Nation (2017) or Aferim! (2015), or older titles, was just as good, as was every single year showing a Corneliu Porumboiu feature. One of the drollest and most entertaining films of the versatile director is The Treasure (2015), about a group of hapless guys looking for a treasure in a garden, a brilliant, hilarious take on a classical motif. Another film that stayed with me for a long time, although it has basically disappeared after having been screened there, was Alexandra Gulea’s Matei Child Miner (2013), a gorgeously shot drama about a taciturn teenage boy growing up with his grandfather in a poor mining town. Although not a perfect picture, I found its visual beauty overwhelming.

Speaking of lesser-known films, there have been so many remarkable documentaries, such as Gheorghe Preda’s eye-opening Camera Obscura (2016), about private film clubs held in communist times, or Șerban Georgescu’s endearing, earnest and ultimately heartbreaking