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Indian cinema triumphs at the 23rd Transylvania International Film Festival, which took place June 14-24 in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca.

First-time director Shuchi Talati won the Transylvania Trophy, the top prize of the International competition, along with its $11,7000 (10,000 euro) bursary for her feature Girls Will Be Girls, a mother-daughter drama that premiered at Sundance earlier this year. The drama follows a young, academically gifted teenager at a strict boarding school in the Himalayas who gets caught up in an emotional love triangle with her mother, as they both compete for the affection of the same boy.

“The story of this film is very rooted in India, but I always hoped that people outside this very specific space and time where the story takes place would resonate with it,” said Talati in a video presented at the Gala ceremony at the Cluj-Napoca’s historic National Theater on Saturday evening. “I...

Indian director Shuchi Talati’s debut feature Girls Will Be Girls was the big winner at this year’s Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) in Cluj, Romania

The coming-of-age story about a teenage girl from a boarding school in the Himalayas won the Transilvania Trophy at the festival’s awards ceremony in Cluj’s historic National Theatre on Saturday evening (June 22).

Girls Will Be Girls previously won the audience award and special jury prize when it premiered in the world dramatic competition at Sundance in January.

Scroll down for full list of winners

In her acceptance speech sent as a video message,...

Indian director Shuchi Talati’s debut feature Girls Will Be Girls was the big winner at this year’s Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) in Cluj, Romania

The coming-of-age story about a teenage girl from a boarding school in the Himalayas won the Transilvania Trophy at the festival’s awards ceremony in Cluj’s historic National Theatre on Saturday evening (June 22).

Girls Will Be Girls previously won the audience award and special jury prize when it premiered in the world dramatic competition at Sundance in January.

Scroll down for full list of winners

In her acceptance speech sent as a video message,...

More than 90 film professionals in Romania have requested that the head of the Romanian Film Center (Cnc), Anca Mitran, steps down, after an interview in which she said that in recent years Romanian filmmakers have been making art films instead of films for the audience, and that documentaries are not meant to be screened in movie theaters, according to Film New Europe.

The first to protest were a handful of documentary filmmakers, including Alexandru Solomon, Andrei Ujica and Andrei Dascalescu, and film editor Dana Bunescu, who launched an open letter signed by Alexander Nanau, Radu Jude, Calin Peter Netzer, Radu Muntean and Stere Gulea, among others.

According to the signatories, Mitran is “attacking” Romanian art films while expressing her regret that films like those made under the Communist regime are not being made anymore.

She is also inaccurate, they said, when she said that documentaries are not popular in Romania.

Above: Porto FrancoOne could argue that cinema and ideology are intrinsically linked with each other, even when one regards even the most menial, apparently wholly apolitical films, such as comedies and romantic dramas. But what happens to said cinema when this link is brutally severed by a severely traumatic event, such as a regime change? How does this modulate the understanding of cinema in relation to the two main, and apparently opposite concepts that usually applied to political readings: propaganda and subversion? And how does regime change affect ulterior output and cinematic canons, especially if the fallen regime was actively involved in censorship and oppression of free speech?The history of various national cinemas across the second half of the 20th century, correlated with the histories of various dictatorships which professed loyalties to both sides of the political spectrum, may shed valuable insights to the above questions. By and large,...

Mihály Schwechtje’s Democracy Work In Progress wins €20,000 Eurimages co-production development award.

Fifteen projects from Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey were presented at the Transilvania Pitch Stop (Tps) at the Transilvania International Film Festival (Tiff) in Cluj-Napoca in Romania last week.

The €20,000 Eurimages co-production development award went to Hungarian filmmaker Mihály Schwechtje’s Democracy Work In Progress. The project had been developed at the Nipkow Programme in Berlin last year.

Turkish director Selman Nacar’s Between Two Dawns was awarded €25,000 in postproduction services from Chainsaw Europe. The project is being co-produced by Romania’s Oana Giurgiu of...

Cluj, Romania–Alejandro Landes’ “Monos,” a survival thriller about a group of rebels set deep in the jungles of Colombia, won the top prize at the Transilvanian Intl. Film Festival on Saturday, with the jury praising the Sundance player “for its hypnotic power through its minimalist storytelling, committed cast, and unsentimental portrait of young people with guns.”

After a week of heavy rains in Cluj that swept across the cobbled streets of its historic city center and disrupted countless open-air screenings, a palpable air of relief seemed to settle over the red carpet Saturday evening, as guests climbed the steps of the National Theater at twilight accompanied by the strains of a string quartet.

Looking back at a week of screenings that continued the festival’s tradition of pushing the envelope with bold and provocative programming, Tiff artistic director Mihai Chirilov described from the podium the “experiment” behind the official...

A quick roundup of goings on in the States and Europe: David Denby on Robert Altman's The Player; highlights from Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema 2014 (featuring work by Corneliu Porumboiu, Andrei Gruzsnicki, Stere Gulea, Valentin Hotea, Maya Vitkova, Cristian Jurgiu and more); Louis C.K., Paul Thomas Anderson and Robert Downey Jr. presenting a Robert Downey Sr. retrospective; sci-fi in Austin; Maggie Smith and Audrey Hepburn in London; John Ford in Paris; Eric Baudelaire in Brussels; and more. » - David Hudson...

A quick roundup of goings on in the States and Europe: David Denby on Robert Altman's The Player; highlights from Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema 2014 (featuring work by Corneliu Porumboiu, Andrei Gruzsnicki, Stere Gulea, Valentin Hotea, Maya Vitkova, Cristian Jurgiu and more); Louis C.K., Paul Thomas Anderson and Robert Downey Jr. presenting a Robert Downey Sr. retrospective; sci-fi in Austin; Maggie Smith and Audrey Hepburn in London; John Ford in Paris; Eric Baudelaire in Brussels; and more. » - David Hudson...