New films by Tudor Giurgiu and Marian Crisan are to be shown in RO Days’ Closed Screenings at this week’s Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) in Cluj-Napoca.
The screenings are open to distributors, festival programmers, and sales agents.
Transilvania festival president Giurgiu’s documentary Nasty about the legendary Romanian tennis player Ilie Nastase includes interviews with Rafa Nadal, Stan Smith, Jimmy Connors, Boris Becker, and Billie Jean King.
At last year’s TIFF, the director had given a sneak preview of around 15 minutes of “work in progress” footage before the festival’s screening of Rex Mliler and Sam Pollard’s documentary Citizen Ashe on the life and career of the late US tennis ace Arthur Ashe.
Giurgiu had been joined on stage at Cinema Victoria by Nastase after the footage was shown to speak about being the subject of a documentary and answering some questions from the audience.
In this year’s festival catalogue, Giurgiu wrote Nastase “became the first rock star in the history of tennis. How not to make a movie about such a character? Controversial, involved in all sorts of unfortunate stories in recent years, but a generous guy with a big heart, a poet.”
This industry-only section will present Marian Crisan’s fifth feature Warboy, a drama set at the end of the Second World War in 1944 in a remote village in the mountains of Western Romania.
The Romanian-Moldovan co-production was produced by Crisan’s own company Rova Film with partners from Moldova and Romania and shot on location in summer and autumn last year in the Apuseni Mountains.
Crisan’s previous credits as a feature film director are Morgen (2010), Rocker (2012), Orizont (2015) and The Campaign (Berliner, 2021).
Doc filmmakers head to Cluj
Meanwhile, this year will be the first time TIFF hosts the Docu Rough Cut Boutique (RCB) workshop for documentaries in post-production from Southeastern Europe, the Caucasus and Ukraine.
Two documentaries from Romania - Isabela von Tent’s On & Off Alice (working title) and Ukrainian filmmaker Lesia Diak’s Dad’s Lullaby - were among the five projects selected for the 2023 round of workshops.
Invited mentors including journalist-filmmaker-producer Dimitra Kouzi, award-winning film editor Ollie Huddleston and audio designer/composer Sebastian Zsemlye will be in Cluj this week to work with the project teams during group sessions and in individual meetings.
RCB’s final workshop module will be held in August during the Sarajevo Film Festival with a special showcase of the projects during the CineLink Industry Days.
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