For film buffs, the acronym TIFF can be confusing, referring to the famous Toronto International Film Festival and, for fans of the Far North, the Tromsø International Film Festival in Norway. But for Romanian viewers, there is only one TIFF: the Transilvania International Film Festival.
It's the biggest film festival in Romania, held annually in Cluj-Napoca. This 24the This edition brought together over 1,000 guests, 125,000 spectators, and several hundred films screened. The figures for the Transylvania International Film Festival (TIFF) reflect the festival's presence, its logo visible on every street corner in the Transylvanian capital. A massive festival in the land of Dracula, it also gave pride of place to new Romanian cinema. While the talents of Cristian Mungiu, Radu Jude, and Cristi Puiu are well-known internationally, many filmmakers remain to be discovered. In "Romanian Days," the TIFF section dedicated to young Romanian cinema, two films were particularly striking in their use of amateur archives as new source material. More specifically, they drew on archives of family films from Romania under the old regime.
Bright Future by Andra MacMasters
The year 1989 marked the end of an era, the world of bipolarity, of the two "blocs." Everywhere, Soviet societies were collapsing, and soon the Romanians would execute their dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, at the end of a revolution that would bring an end to more than forty years of communism. Yet, in the summer of 1989, Marxist-Leninist youth from around the world gathered for a monumental festival in Pyongyang, as if nothing had happened. This World Festival of Youth and Students took place almost every year in major cities of the Eastern Bloc. That year, it was the capital of North Korea, a kind of Disneyworld of Stalinist-style communism, that hosted the events. Andra MacMasters recovered the archival footage that a young participant filmed there with his camera. She accompanies these images with a purely factual text, narrated in voice-over, describing the philosophy of the event, what can be done there, and which countries are invited. At no point does the director amplify or exploit this absolutely dizzying paradox of an excessive celebration, with its lavish grandiloquence and spectacular displays that only the North Korean regime seems capable of producing, while perestroika is already well underway and the Berlin Wall is about to fall. Unlike other filmmakers, Andra MacMasters holds her audience in high esteem: they are capable of thinking for themselves, and it is therefore unnecessary to bombard them with obvious truths. In this documentary, she offers us images of a spectacle we are unlikely to forget: the swan song of communism, which "dies on stage," overwhelmed by light. Amidst traditional singing performances and kung fu demonstrations, Andra MacMasters' images offer glimpses into numerous debates within the socialist world, from the role of women in society to the repression of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing by another communist regime. A particularly precious record of a changing world.
Bright future by Andra MacMasters
Coming soon to theaters
Merman d'Ana Lungu
At the heart of this archival documentary, Ana Lungu tells the story of a somewhat unsuccessful, somewhat forgotten composer in Romania of yesteryear. With her deliberately imperfect voice-over (the director doesn't hesitate to correct herself, coughs, as if she were providing live commentary on the images we see during a conference – a bit like Raymond Depardon did in The Turning Point YearsIn the film, the director presents various amateur films she claims to have discovered. Some reels show the composer's travels in all the major Soviet capitals, and sometimes beyond the Iron Curtain, while others depict evenings with friends or weekends at the beach. Another box of reels is more mysterious: it contains only shots of flowers and faceless female nudes in explicitly pornographic poses. Who are these women? What was the composer's relationship with them? And why these films? Ana Lungu offers several interpretations. Under the communist regime, possession of pornographic images was a crime punishable by imprisonment, she explains. The composer was therefore taking a great risk in creating these images, even if their rarity made them all the more precious. One might imagine that he participated in a clandestine network trafficking pornographic images. But this is unlikely: judging by the other images, the composer led a comfortable life thanks to his profession and, a priori, did not need a second job. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of shots of female nudes with shots of flowers suggests an artistic intention. It's not impossible that he saw himself as the heir to Gustave Courbet or Botticelli, like a painter of nudes in a turbulent era. Because Merman is also a portrait of a different era. Somewhat like the analysis of theAmerican way of life through the Anonymous Project photographic project, which paints a comprehensive portrait of an American past through rediscovered family photographs, Merman It tells us about the communist world through the background of private photos, and from the point of view of someone who seems to have been a hedonist in an austere society, a character as enigmatic as he is fascinating.
Merman Ana Lungu
Coming soon to theaters
