Transilvania International Film Festival: Anniversary edition to take place this summer

Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) will hold its 20th edition between July 23 and August 1, in Cluj-Napoca.

For this year’s event, the festival’s team worked with two scenarios. The first one entailed returning to TIFF’s usual period, with the initially announced dates of May 28 - June 6. The second scenario was based on the assumption that the current evolution of the pandemic will allow screenings to take place in last year’s format. The current context and the information provided by the authorities determined the dates for TIFF 2021: July 23 – August 1, the organizers said.

This year’s edition will mix open-air and indoor screenings, if the context allows them, within the capacity set by the authorities. It is put together “with the hope that local norms concerning open-air public events will align to those in most European countries, where the number of people allowed to attend goes up to 1,000 or even more,” the organizers said, stressing that safety measures remain a priority.

As it happened last year, a selection of films will be available online, on the festival’s VoD platform TIFF Unlimited.

“In 2002, TIFF was born despite all the circumstances of that period, in a country with a film industry going numb, and cinema halls that were emptying and closing. There was nothing ordinary in our evolution, and our 20th anniversary could only be special. We want to look back on the great moments we lived through these years, alongside fans, friends, and TIFF guests. We opted for the safest version we could do,” TIFF’s president Tudor Giurgiu said.

“With fresh films and anniversary screenings, long-term development initiatives and clips from the festival’s archive, concerts, exhibitions, albums, and novel venues on the map of a city continuously reinventing itself, TIFF.20 aims to offer not just a vaccine-edition and a memorable event but also the hope of regaining an almost lost normality,” artistic director Mihai Chirilov said.

(Photo: Nicu Cherciu/ courtesy of TIFF)