7th Cluj Transsilvania International Film Festival

The mythical region of Transilvania — dark castles and caves, vampires, a strange landscape — has its own film festival in the city of Cluj, which celebrated its 7th edition. Founded in 2001 by two enthusiasts, filmmaker Tudor Giurgiu and film critic Mihai Chirilov the festival has rapidly grown into the most important film event in Romania. The films are screened in five theaters in Cluj-Napoca — one of the biggest towns in Romania which has around 300,000 inhabitants — as well as open air at Babes Bolyai University (50,000 students) with repetitions in the town of Sibiu and in the first drive-in-cinema in Romania. A rather small competition with 12 films — first and second feature films — from Europe, Mexico and the USA was presented and a lot of interesting sidebars such as “Supernova”, “Shadows” (short films), “No Limits”, “Real Time”, specials concerning Hungary, Romania, Russia and Denmark. Guest star Catherine Deneuve received the Transilvania Lifetime Achievement Award. The festival promotes young cinema showing more than 100 films and helping to find distribution in Romania. It attracted around 50,000 spectators. Our jury gave its prize to the movie Anger in the section “No Limits”. The movie was also shown in the festivals of Guadalaja and Berlin. (Andrea Dittgen)