Nine feature films, including four debuts, have entered the Bucharest International Film Festival (BIFF) competition. The film titles were presented exclusively and in premiere.
52 Tuesdays, a film directed by Sophie Hyde, depicts the story of a young girl whose sexual life is only beginning, and yet she is faced with her mother becoming a man. The feature film won the Best Director award at this year’s Sundance Festival and the 2014 Berlin Festival.
Filth, directed by Jon S. Baird, is the first film adaptation of one of Irvine Welsh’s novels since Trainspotting and it is very likely the role of James McAvoy’s career, who won at the 2013 British Independent Film Awards.
Another film that made the BIFF competition is In Bloom, directed by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross, a Georgian film debut shot by Oleg Mutu and compared by critics to other praised productions under the ‘new Romanian wave’ moniker. The feature film won four awards at the 2013 Sarajevo Film Festival, including an award for Best Film.
The Selfish Giant by Clio Barnard is rather a poetic and ruthless social fable following in the footsteps of pioneers Ken Loach and Alan Clarke, and more recently, Lynn Ramsay and Andrea Arnold than an adaptation of Oscar Wilde. The film won the Label Europa Cinemas – Quinzaine des realisateurs Award at the 2013 edition of the Cannes Festival.
Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12 (photo) also features on the BIFF competition film list. It is a sad, but optimistic story inspired by experiences from the director’s own youth about a group of volunteers in a nursing home for mentally troubled children in California. The film won the Best Actress Award (Brie Larson), the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and the Young Jury Award at the Locarno Festival in 2013.
The Strange Little Cat by Ramon Zurcher is an objective exercise in style that portrays one day in the life of a family in Berlin. Almost a film school diploma production, The Strange Little Cat was guided by film veteran Bela Tarr and released in 2013 in Berlin.
Stories We Tell, a film directed by Sarah Polley, is a fascinating experiment at the border between fiction and documentary, in which the actress/director investigates her parents’ secrets and turns cinema into reality and vice versa. In 2013, the film won the Critics’ Award in Los Angeles, Toronto, and New York in the Non-Fiction Category.
Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color is an entirely unique film manifesto awaited by cinema lovers for ten years, since the director’s debut, Primer. The film received the Special Jury Prize at Sundance in 2013.
An oversaturated, nuanced and emotional essay, Violet is a minimalist, yet stylized film. The Belgian film debut features a boy who witnesses his best friend being stabbed to death and it bears a structural and thematic resemblance to Paranoid Park. It won the Grand Prize of the International Jury, Generation 14plus category, in Berlin, 2014.
The tenth edition of the Bucharest International Film Festival will unfold from March 26 until April 2 at Cinema Studio, NCRR – Horia Bernea Studio, Elvira Popescu Hall, and the Cervantes Institute.
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