Romanian film review – Great Cinema Now: Bucharest International Film Festival

Every single year I'm surprised when the Bucharest International Film Festival (BIFF) is announced, as if it were a completely new event. But of course it is not; it has been around for ten years now and the selection has been always a great one. I guess one could blame BIFF's impractical website for this or their sleepy Facebook page and lack of proper publicity but to be fair, film enthusiasts will save the date either way and hopefully more than a few accidental “tourists” will drop by for a few screenings this week (BIFF starts today, March 26, and ends next Wednesday, April 2). The opening film, the recent Academy Award winner for Best Foreign picture, La grande bellezza/The Great Beauty is one of the most lavish and life-affirming films I have seen, a wicked, funny, decadent and very entertaining tale of a blasé writer past his best years drifting aimlessly through Rome and living the high but rather pointless life. The competition looks solid as well, with such great titles like 52 Tuesdays, a tender and touching story of a teenage girl witnessing her mother go through a sex change, Das merkwürdige Kätzchen/The Strange Little Cat, a minimalist and wonderful episode of a family meeting in a small Berlin flat, the loud and outrageously funny Filth, an adaptation of Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh's eponymous novel, or a sensitive debut about the friendship between two girls on the brink of womanhood in a time marked by political chaos (Grzeli nateli dgeebi/In Bloom). The selection, which is already more than eclectic, is rounded by the head-scratcher American indie film Upstream Color, a film which you can either love or hate but even if you feel the latter, like yours truly, it's certainly a picture you don't get to see in regular cinemas so kudos to BIFF for showing it. The non-competitive section dedicated to Chile is equally impressive, with grandmaster Jodorowsky in great shape (La danza de la realidad/TheDance of Reality