Cluj, Romania–More than a decade after a tide of critically acclaimed and award-winning features announced the arrival of the Romanian New Wave, the Transilvania Film Festival’s annual Romanian Days program continues to offer a vital and wide-ranging survey of the country’s dynamic film industry.
This year’s edition, which kicks off June 6, will present 15 features and 22 short films over the course of three days in Cluj, presenting what Tiff artistic director Mihai Chirilov calls “a recap of the best in Romanian cinema.”
A highlight this year will be the Romanian premiere of “The Whistlers,” which arrives in Cluj on the heels of its world premiere in Cannes Critics’ Week. Corneliu Poromboiu’s latest feature is a noir-inspired crime thriller about a Romanian police inspector who gets entangled in a high-stakes heist that takes him to the Spanish island of La Gomera. Chirilov describes it as “a genre film,...
This year’s edition, which kicks off June 6, will present 15 features and 22 short films over the course of three days in Cluj, presenting what Tiff artistic director Mihai Chirilov calls “a recap of the best in Romanian cinema.”
A highlight this year will be the Romanian premiere of “The Whistlers,” which arrives in Cluj on the heels of its world premiere in Cannes Critics’ Week. Corneliu Poromboiu’s latest feature is a noir-inspired crime thriller about a Romanian police inspector who gets entangled in a high-stakes heist that takes him to the Spanish island of La Gomera. Chirilov describes it as “a genre film,...
- 6/5/2019
- by Christopher Vourlias
- Variety Film + TV
A Land Imagined director Yeo Siew Hua Below you will find the awards for the 71st Locarno Festival, as well as an index of our coverage.AWARDSInternational CompetitionGolden Leopard: A Land Imagined (Yeo Siew Hua) Special Jury Prize: M (Yolande Zauberman) Special Mention: Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham) Best Direction: Dominga Sotomayor (Too Late to Die Young) Best Actress: Andra Guti (Alice T.) Best Actor: Ki Joobong (Hotel By the River)Filmmakers of the Present Golden Leopard: Chaos (Sara Fattahi) Special Jury Prize: Closing Time (Nicole Vögele) Prize for Best Emerging Director: Tarik Aktas (Dead Horse Nebula) Special Mention: Fausto (Andrea Bussmann)Rose in Matthieu Bareyre's L'EpoqueSigns of Life Best Film: The Fragile House (Lin Zi) Mantarraya Award: The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (Benjamin Crotty)First Feature Best First Feature: Alles Ist Gut (Eva Trobisch)Art Peace Hotel Award: Acid Forest (Rugile Barzdziukaite)Special Mention: Erased, Ascent of the...
- 8/24/2018
- MUBI
The 71st edition of the Locarno Film Festival drew to a close over the weekend, with Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua’s contemporary noir “A Land Imagined” taking the Golden Lion award in the international competition.
Yeo’s first narrative feature since his experimental 2009 debut “In the House of Straw,” the politically infused mystery – about a Singapore police detective on the trail of a missing Chinese construction worker – was not a widely expected winner of the top prize in a diverse competition that included well-received features by Hong Sang-soo, Radu Muntean and Kent Jones. Variety critic Jay Weissberg was less impressed than Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke’s jury, writing that the film “privileges style over coherence.”
At an award ceremony that saw victories for several female filmmakers, France’s Yolande Zauberman took the Special Jury Prize, essentially the runner-up gong, for “M,” a Yiddish-language exploration of Bnei Brak, the Israeli...
Yeo’s first narrative feature since his experimental 2009 debut “In the House of Straw,” the politically infused mystery – about a Singapore police detective on the trail of a missing Chinese construction worker – was not a widely expected winner of the top prize in a diverse competition that included well-received features by Hong Sang-soo, Radu Muntean and Kent Jones. Variety critic Jay Weissberg was less impressed than Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke’s jury, writing that the film “privileges style over coherence.”
At an award ceremony that saw victories for several female filmmakers, France’s Yolande Zauberman took the Special Jury Prize, essentially the runner-up gong, for “M,” a Yiddish-language exploration of Bnei Brak, the Israeli...
- 8/13/2018
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
The 71st edition of the Swiss film festival closed with the awards ceremony on August 11.
Siew Hua Yeo’s second feature A Land Imagined has become the first film from Singapore to take home the top honour of the Golden Leopard in the history of the Locarno Festival.
The Singapore-France-Netherlands co-production, which received backing from Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund and Cnc’s World Cinema Fund, follows a police investigator who must find a missing migrant in industrial Singapore.
The International Competition jury headed by Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-Ke awarded the special jury prize to Yolande Zauberman’s documentary M,...
Siew Hua Yeo’s second feature A Land Imagined has become the first film from Singapore to take home the top honour of the Golden Leopard in the history of the Locarno Festival.
The Singapore-France-Netherlands co-production, which received backing from Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund and Cnc’s World Cinema Fund, follows a police investigator who must find a missing migrant in industrial Singapore.
The International Competition jury headed by Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-Ke awarded the special jury prize to Yolande Zauberman’s documentary M,...
- 8/11/2018
- by Martin Blaney
- ScreenDaily
Locarno, Switzerland — All you need is love. But Alice, a foster child looked after by her foster mother whose husband has walked out of them, is horrified she isn’t lovable. So she seeks constant confirmation, seemingly by the hour, of her mother’s unquestioning love, forgiveness for her unacceptable behavior. Unreliable, rude, confrontational, a bad student, a violent bully, a near pathological liar, Alice gets pregnant, inspires her mother with her a reborn life dream of maternity, then decides to abort. Set in a well-enough Bucharest, Locarno International Competition contender “Alice T.” shapes up into a cautionary tale about pushing love too hard. Variety talked to Romania’s Radu Muntean, a Cannes Festival regular, about what may be his most challenging film, given the serial obnoxiousness of its lead character.
Audiences are bound to start asking very early in the film why Alice behaves the way she does. One explanation is huge,...
Audiences are bound to start asking very early in the film why Alice behaves the way she does. One explanation is huge,...
- 8/8/2018
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
Radu Muntean’s particular brand of undramatic Romanian realism works best when it’s possible to extend sympathy to his main characters; when likability is non-existent, the experiment falls flat. That’s the inescapable flaw of “Alice T.,” a slice-of-life look at a narcissistic 16-year-old fabulist of unredeeming unpleasantness who leads her mother and friends on a merry lark when she gets pregnant, claims to want the child, and then medically aborts without telling her family. A final, overextended scene appears to locate some kind of frightened remorse in the teen, but few will buy this kind of redemption. Muntean’s reputation with the festival crowd should guarantee a fair amount of travel, but not as much as his earlier films.
Characterized by flaming red hair and a hardened streak of intractability, Alice (Andra Guti) has just taken abortion money from her boyfriend Horatiu (Octavian Strunila), although she has no...
Characterized by flaming red hair and a hardened streak of intractability, Alice (Andra Guti) has just taken abortion money from her boyfriend Horatiu (Octavian Strunila), although she has no...
- 8/6/2018
- by Jay Weissberg
- Variety Film + TV
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