American Independent Film Festival returns to Cluj-Napoca between April 21st-23rd
at Cinema Victoria and Cinema Arta
Tickets are now on sale
Between April 21st-23rd, Clujeans are invited to attend the American Independent Film Festival at Cinema Victoria (April 21st-22nd) and Cinema Arta (April 22nd-23rd). The organisers of this edition, presented by Fortech, a GlobalLogic Company, have put forth a programme of award-winning films from the world’s most important international festivals, starring actors such as Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Frances McDormand, Adam Driver and Joaquin Phoenix, in a selection of indie films that includes the 2023 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2023.
An ingenious adaptation of the novel by Miriam Toews, for which Sarah Polley (writer and director) was awarded the Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay at the 95th Academy Awards this past March, WOMEN TALKING begins with the statement, “What follows is an act of female imagination.” The phrase, taken directly from Toews, was used by the elders of an isolated religious colony in an attempt to explain years of sexual assaults – attributed to ghosts, demons and even hysteria (“wild female imagination”) that left women and girls terrorised, pregnant or dead. When the attackers are finally caught and arrested “for their own protection”, women have a brief window in which to imagine their future. Should they stay in the community that abused them or leave, breaking away from the Garden of Eden, alienated from the religion they still believe in?
The film that stars Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Carol, Her), Claire Foy (The Crown), Jessie Buckley (Fargo, Judy) and Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Nomadland, The French Dispatch) “is at once chilling, thrilling, unnerving and inspiring,” notes The New Yorker, and “achieves something extraordinary: as the characters talk to each other, they speak directly to the viewer, and the barn is at once a metaphor for the whole world and the physical location in which these women find themselves on the brink of change” as the Financial Times notes. The screening will take place at Cinema Victoria on Saturday, April 22nd at 8:00pm.
Lawrence Kweller, un adolescent de 17 ani fără prea multe aspirații dar pasionat de filme, se angajează la un centru de închirieri casete video unde începe o relație complicată cu șefa lui mai în vârstă. I LIKE MOVIES este „proaspăt, plăcut, captivant, un coming-of-age blând și bine echilibrat”, este „genul de film care poate face chiar și unui critic cinic să-i placă din nou filmele” conchidea IndieWire despre debutul în lungmetraj al regizorului Chandler Levack după proiecția din cadrul Toronto Film Festival. Proiecție la Cinema Victoria, vineri, 21 aprilie, de la ora 20.00.
After the worldwide success of Tangerine, Sean Baker’s previous film shot on an iPhone, the director continued his ascent by constructing THE FLORIDA PROJECT into a realistic fable about innocence, happiness and love in communities on the edge of Disney World theme park. Young mother Halley and her six-year-old daughter Moonee spend their days in the idyllic colourful world of Orlando’s poverty-stricken motels, enjoying life to the fullest. Their loving protector is also motel manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe, Oscar, Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG nominated for his role). When the specter of poverty threatens to tear their fairytale life apart, Halley’s solution puts their family at risk with grave consequences. “The film offers a poignant perspective on childhood” (Deadline Hollywood), is “glorious and wonderful” (The New York Times) and “remains in the collective memory as one of the great films about childhood” (The Irish Times). Sean Baker is one of the most humane directors of the moment, says The Film Journal. Baker is known for his independent features Starlet, Tangerine and Red Rocket – in competition at Cannes in 2021, which screened at Cinema Victoria in the warm up to the 2022 American Independent Film Festival. THE FLORIDA PROJECT screens at Cinema Victoria on Saturday, April 22nd, at 5:30 pm.
PATERSON, which premiered in competition at Cannes, celebrates everyday life with its small victories, its defeats and its poetry. Adam Driver plays an ordinary man from Paterson, New Jersey, nicknamed “Poet’s Town” who lives a simple life, but observes and turns the little things and gestures around him into poetry. Charming and moving, an ode to the everyday, PATERSON was enthusiastically received by international critics as “one of the most luminous films” by American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, perhaps the most important contemporary independent filmmaker. “Slowly but surely, the gentleness of Jarmusch’s wonderful film charms you with its almost miraculous innocence,” wrote The Guardian. PATERSON screens at the Cinema ARTA on Saturday, April 22nd at 5.30pm.
GOOD TIME is the fifth feature from brothers Josh and Ben Safdie, about whom Indiewire wrote that “there are simply no other filmmakers capable of generating comedy and suspense at the same time and at the same level.” The film was selected in the Official Selection Cannes and is “intense, hallucinatory, full of violence without showing a single shot. An eloquent shot that brings the urban landscape to the level of art,” wrote The New Yorker.
After a botched bank robbery sends his younger brother to prison, Constantine (Robert Pattinson) embarks on a strange odyssey into the city’s underworld in an increasingly desperate and dangerous attempt to free him. Over the course of one adrenaline-fueled night, Constantine is caught in the midst of a raid on a violent and chaotic reality, striving desperately to save his brother (played by director Ben Safdie) and himself, knowing that their lives hang in the balance. In the tradition of Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese’s urban thrillers, the film creates an authentic puzzle of memorable faces, places and moods that tell a universal story of brotherhood. GOOD TIME screens at Cinema ARTA, Saturday, April 22nd, at 8:00pm.
The feature film A THOUSAND AND ONE, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2023, will have its Romanian premiere at Cinema ARTA, on the last night of the American Independent Film Festival, on Sunday, April 23, at 8:00pm.
“A mesmerizing Teyana Taylor stars in director A.V. Rockwell’s feature debut – A THOUSAND AND ONE – a captivating love story set in New York City, a film about motherhood and survival in a rapidly changing city,” – The New York Times, whose review continues: “the feature is like a miracle. It’s a small project only in a prosaic sense. It’s an intimate, human film about ordinary people fighting ordinary battles.” Though she struggles moving from shelter to shelter with her six-year-old son Terry, Inez lives life on her own terms, with no regrets in 1990s New York. When Terry is threatened with being put back into foster care, she decides to kidnap him.
A THOUSAND AND ONE “is a tender, often painful portrait of the unstable but loving bond between a mother and her son, both spat out of the foster care system. It is also a broad evocation of a city in the throes of accelerating gentrification and discriminatory policing,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2023, the world’s leading independent film festival.
The films at Cinema Victoria will be introduced by Professor Doru Pop, film critic, and those at Cinema ARTA by film critic Ion Indolean.
This is the second year that viewers in Cluj-Napoca can attend screenings at the American Independent Film Festival after last year’s festival held a warm-up in Cluj also presented by Fortech, a GlobalLogic Company.
AIFF.1 Cluj-Napoca is a cultural project organized by Asociatia Cinemascop
With the support of: Banca Transilvania, The Embassy of the United States of America*, The Romanian Cultural Institute, the Ministry of Culture, Dacin Sara.
Local Partners: Cinema Victoria, Cinema Arta, Iulius Mall, Bookstory, Daisler Print House, Green Room, Leonidas, Demmers.
Local Media Partners: Media 9, TransTelex, Maszol, Szabadsag, Cluj24, Cluj.com, Filmtett, Paprika Radio.
Partners: French Institute in Romania, National Film Archive, Cinemateca Română, Europa Cinemas, Eventbook.
National media partners: PRO TV, Radio Guerrilla, AGERPRES.
*This project is funded in part by a grant from the US Department of State. The opinions, findings and conclusions presented during the project are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. State Department.
Mai multe informații și noutăți despre AIFF Cluj-Napoca pot fi găsite pe:
https://filmedefestival.ro/american-independent-ff/editia-2023