With memories of Cristian Mungiu’s second Palme d’Or, for the Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve-starring “Fjord,” still fresh just weeks after the director’s latest Cannes triumph, you’d be hard-pressed to recall a time when Romanian filmmakers weren’t feted on world cinema’s biggest stages. Unless, that is, you asked the organizers of the Transilvania Intl. Film Festival, whose 25th edition takes place June 12 – 21 in the medieval city of Cluj.
When the festival debuted in 2002, Romania was largely a backwater in the eyes of even the most ardently global cinephiles. It would be three years before Cristi Puiu’s audacious black comedy “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” would herald the arrival of a new cinematic movement in Cannes, and two more before Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” would win the director his first Palme. Until then, the Romanian New Wave had yet to register so much as a ripple, while the teetering domestic movie industry was on the brink of collapse.
“No Romanian films. No proper infrastructure. Cinemas were going down. No state involvement, financially,” recalls TIFF artistic director Mihai Chirilov. It was in part to bolster local moviemakers that festival founder and president Tudor Giurgiu decided to launch Romania’s first international film event, both “to offer better exposure to our films and to bring decision-makers and use the festival as a launchpad for new projects,” he says.
