TIFF 2018
Held in the northwestern city of Cluj Napoca, the Transylvania International Film Festival this year put the spotlight on South-American cinema. A production from Paraguay won the Grand Prize, namely Marcelo Martinessi’s The Heiresses, which also won the Silver Bear trophy at the Berlin Film Festival this winter. Martinessi was handed the award by none other than the great Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu. According to a festival release, Marcelo Martinessi impressed the jury through his exceptional rigor and the captivating pace of his film, winning a competition in which 11 other very good films made the jury’s task very difficult.
Roxana Vasile, 04.06.2018, 14:03
The jury made up of director Dagur Kari, casting director and filmmaker Stephane Foenkinos, script writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, the actor Vlad Ivanov and the director Agnes Kocsis gave the award for best director to the Icelandic director Hlynur Palmason for his film Winter Brothers, which impressed through its “passion and cinematographic beauty and energy”. Three of the actors playing in Anchor and Hope by the Spanish director Carlos Marques Marcet stood out for the “exceptional way in which they complement each other on screen, with intelligence and charm, to create emotional roles full of humour”, so the award for best actor went jointly to Natalia Tena, Oona Chaplin and David Verdaguer.
They received the trophy from the French-American actor Jean-Marc Barr, one of the festival’s special guests. Two courageous productions won the Jury’s Special Prize, Asghar Yousefinejad’s The Home and Anna Kruglova’s Scythe Hitting Stone. The FIPRESCI Prize, awarded by the International Federation of Film Critics, went to Ruth Mader’s Life Guidance, a title shown in the section To be or not to be politically correct.
The audience award went to Gustav Moller’s thriller The Guilty. The guest of honour of this year’s festival, the French actor Fanny Ardant received a lifetime achievement award. Her acceptance speech was very emotional. The 50-year-long career of the ethnic-Hungarian Romanian actor Anna Szeles was also celebrated through a special prize. Last but not least, the Young Francophone Jury Prize given by TV5 Monde, the French Institute and RFI Romania went to Cedric Kahn’s The Prayer for its “harmonious visual discourse, soundtrack and absorbing characters”. (Translated by C. Mateescu)
