Golden Carpathian festival and market

The children of the night were certainly rocking as the first Golden Carpathian European Film and Fair came to a spectacular close in Ploiesti, Romania. The awards ceremony was broadcast live on Romanian National TV and enlivened by the K1  troupe’s ethno-rock version of Carpathian ballads voiced by an opera diva ,which was then followed by a free open-air concert from Goran Bregovic and his Weddings and Funerals Band. The crowd seemed to include what seemed like half the population of this 200,00-plus oil-rich city (60 kilometres from Bucharest) dancing on the steps of the Palace of Culture.

The event (Aug 25-28) brought some 50 buyers and sellers from as far afield as Uruguay to the well-equipped belle epoque Hotel Central, with the competition programme unreeling in an 800-seater adjacent cinema, renovated in three weeks and re-opened (after years of disuse) and renamed the Premiera only hours before the opening gala.

All screenings were crowded, and the ex-Patria cinema now has a stylish cafe-bar with a luxury viewing theatre, bringing movie-going back to the capital of the Prahova province.The  international jury shared cash awards totalling €10,000 between Pal Adrienn, Agnes Kocsis’s art-house hit from Hungary, which took the Grand Prix, with Marcin Wrona named best director for The Christening, a homo-erotic contemporary Polish crime drama, and the best screenplay award to Zlatko Topcic for The Abandoned (Bosnia-Herzegovina), while  Nevio Marasovic from Zagreb was named best debut director for his modern apocalypse story The Show Must Go On.

There were nightly open-air screenings of new and classic Romanian comedies, while foreign guests were treated to visits to the sumptuous summer palace of Ferdinand the First in the mountain resort of Sinaia, and to the even more spectacular Palace of the People in Bucurest, both suggesting themselves as settings for future co-productions.

Photos courtesy of Manuroartis.