Alejandro Landes’ film Monos gets top prize at Romania’s TIFF festival

Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) awarded this year’s Transilvania Trophy to Colombian-Ecuadorian director Alejandro Landes for the film Monos.

Monos premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award. The film, described as a “tribal fable”, follows a rebel group of teenage commandos in a remote setting in Latin America.

The award amounts to EUR 15,000. It was granted by a jury made up of directors Denis Côté and Constantin Popescu, producers Mike Goodridge and Anita Juka, and Grainne Humphreys, the director of the Dublin International Film Festival.

The Best Director award, amounting to EUR 5,000, went to filmmaker May el-Toukhy for the “daring, mature and sophisticated way” she directed Queen of Hearts.

The Best Performance award went to actor Ingvar E. Sigurdsson for his role in the film A White, White Day. The actor received a EUR 1,500 award from Conceptual Lab.

Louis Garrel’s romantic comedy A Faithful Man took home the Special Jury Prize, amounting to EUR 1,500 and offered by HBO.

The FIPRESCI prized, offered by the International Federation of Film Critics to one of the films in the Religion Class section of the festival, went to Wojciech Smarzowski’s Clergy. The critics chose the film for “the ingenious way it presents priests as both aggressors and victims.” The Public’s Choice award went to Nora Fingscheidt’s System Crasher.

The Romanian Film Days the feature film award went to Andrei Cohn’s Arrest, while Marius Olteanu’s Monsters landed the debut prize. A special mention went to Nora Agapi’s Timebox.

TIFF also awarded costume designer Oana Păunescu for her entire career, while actor Marcel Iureș received the Excellence Award.

Speaking of the festival’s competition section this year, TIFF’s artistic director Mihai Chirilov said he was looking to experiment. “We made an experiment. I think it was a successful one. I tried to bring together 12 films which make no politics but make cinema. They speak of relationships, they speak about us. These are very intimate films,” Chirilov said of the films included in this year’s official competition.

(Photo: TIFF president Tudor Giurgiu presents the Transilvania Trophy; photo by Vlad Cupsa/ tiff.ro)