One of the most anticipated cultural events of the fall begins today, October 13th, and will pervade Bucharest for 10 days, Brașov for a week (October 13th-19th) and Cluj for a weekend (October 13th-15th). Over 10,000 tickets were already sold in advance on Eventbook.ro before the start of the festival. Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest this year takes place at CinemaPRO, Cinema Elvire Popesco, the Peasant’s Museum Cinema (Cinema Muzeul Țăranului), and Cinema Eforie. The program can be found at www.filmedefestival.ro.
In Bucharest, winning films of the Palme d’Or are scheduled to open the festival in the 4 theatres. After the opening gala, which begins at 19:00 o’clock at the Peasant’s Museum Cinema, the film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days will be screened at 20:30 with the cast in attendance. Also at 20:30, this year’s winner of the Palme d’Or, The Square, will be shown at CinemaPRO, followed by a question and answer session with the Swedish director Ruben Östlund via Skype. Tickets for this evening’s screening of the Swedish non-conformist comedy already sold out on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Entre les murs shows at Cinema Elvira Popesco, the Palme d’Or winner for the French director Laurent Cantet, one of the two special guests of the festival, to whom there is also a dedicated retrospective. Laurent Cantet will arrive in Romania on October 18th and introduce the film Retour à Ithaque (Return to Ithaca), which will be preceded by the screening of his short film, Tous à la manif, for which he received the Prix Jean Vigo in 1994. On October 19th, he will participate in the premiere of his most recent film, L’Atelier (The Workshop), included this year in the Cannes Un Certain Regard competition and, after the film, will be taking questions from the audience in a discussion moderated by Boglarka Nagy.
The fourth Palme d’Or screened on Friday is Pelle the Conqueror (1987), directed by Bille August. The filmmaker has twice claimed the trophy at Cannes and became the first Palme d’Or winner to decide to make a film for the Chinese market. The film is called The Chinese Widow and can be seen Sunday at 17:30 at the Peasant’s Museum Cinema as part of the CHINA FOCUS of this edition of the festival.
To open the CHINA FOCUS, the short film A Gentle Night by Qiu Yang (Palme d’Or, Cannes 2017) will be screened. The screening will take place at 18:00 on Saturday at the Peasant’s Museum Cinema, and will be introduced by the film critic Maggie Lee (Variety) with the director Qiu Yang in attendance via Skype. The film A Gentle Night will be followed by the feature length Mystery by Ye Lou, (Un Certain Regard, Cannes 2012). In the CHINA FOCUS section, there will also be I Am Not Madame Bovary, the film by Xiaogang Feng, who had his world premiere at Cannes and won several festival awards from around the world. The film Angels Wear White brings us the work of Vivian Qu on the screen, one of the most renowned and appreciated contemporary Chinese filmmakers.
The Assassin, by Hou Hsiao-hsien, winner of the Best Director Award at Cannes in 2015, proposed by Taiwan to the Oscars is a wonderful exploration of the history of martial arts, with the dialogues in Chinese. It is possibly one of the most viewed recent films in Europe, that has been meet by the international press with applause. During the Tang dynasty in the 9th century, a female assassin is ordered to kill a nobleman she’d once loved. “Shot for shot, it’s perhaps the most ravishingly beautiful film Hou has ever made, and certainly one of his most deeply transporting,” writes the American publication “Variety”
CHINA FOCUS closes with the winner of this year’s Golden Leopard from the Locarno International Film Festival, Mrs. Fang. The film about the radical documentarian Wang Bing tells a story that generated an entire ethical debate both during its filming, as well as after premiering, at the prestigious Swiss festival. Mrs. Fang is presented in partnership with Astra Film Sibiu – being one of the 4 documentaries present at Cannes, and which the two festivals, taking place in parallel, have decided to present concurrently and in premiere this week in Bucharest and Sibiu.
Also taking place this week is the Béla Tarr Retrospective, with four of the director’s most powerful films. Today, the film Almanac of Fall (1985) is screened at 20:30 at Cinema Eforie, as Saturday at the same place, the filmmaker’s masterpiece, Werckmeister Harmonies (2001) is shown at 15:45, and at 19:00 o’clock, the film awarded in Venice, The Turin Horse (2011), after which the director decided to withdraw from filmmaking. Also at Cinema Eforie, the director’s 7-and-a-half-hour film, Satantango (1994), will be shown on film on Sunday.
Béla Tarr, a lone wolf of post-Tarkovskian, Eastern European cinema, rarely accepts public outings and for this, we are even more looking forward to the open discussion about cinema and his films, which will take place Saturday at Cinema Eforie. The highly-anticipated director will enter in dialogue with the renowned French critic, Jean Michel Frodon, a special guest of the festival.
Last but not least, Sunday, October 15th is a special day in which the cinephile audience of Bucharest has the opportunity to see, in the flesh, one of the youngest and most talented actors of the moment, Louis Garrel. Coming from a family of filmmakers and present in two films that will be shown this weekend at the 8th edition of Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest, Louis Garrel will take questions from the audience after the screening of the film Le Redoubtable at CinemaPRO, directed by Michel Hazanavicius, where he portrays the personality of Jean-Luc Godard, the emblematic figure of the French New Wave.
With this, Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest invites you all to reserve your seats in time to the films and debates that interest you, as more than 10,000 tickets have already been booked before the opening of the festival by many lovers of the arthouse films brought from the Croisette this year.
Every evening, after the screenings, cinephiles are expected for a glass of wine at Apollo 111 (Strada Actor Ion Brezoianu, nr. 23-25) to talk about the films of the day and about those following.
Tickets for the eighth edition of Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest are on sale at Eventbook.ro and in the Eventbook network. The complete program and more details about films and guests are available on the site filmedefestival.ro.
The Béla Tarr Retrospective is organized by Voodoo Films and financed by the National Center for Cinematography and Artists in dialogue – Laurent Cantet is a project co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.*
The festival is presented by Orange Romania, a traditional partner of the event.
Supported by: BRD Groupe Société Générale
Official car of the festival: Renault
With the support of: Catena, Apa Nova, Groupama Asigurări, Silva, TASTEmakers
Official Coffee of the festival: Nespresso
The eighth edition of Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest is organized by the Cinemascop Association and Voodoo Films, in partnership with the Embassy of France and the French Institute in Bucharest.
Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest is a cultural project financed by the The Ministry of Culture and National Identity, the National Center of Cinematography, SACD / Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers), the Cultural Project Centre of the Bucharest City Hall – ARCUB, within the Cultural Program “Bucureşti Oraș Participativ” 2017 and the Romanian Cultural Institute.
Partners: Hotel Mercure, S.E.R.V.E, UPS, Media Image Factory, PiArt Vision, Ţuca Zbârcea & Asociaţii.
Media partners: Europa FM, TVR, Zile și Nopți, Cinemap, Glamour, VIVA!, ELLE, News.ro, A List Magazine, Observator Cutural, Scena9, Agerpres, LiterNet, The Institute, Cinemagia, Movie News, AaRC, Cinefan, Umblat.ro, Urban.ro
Media monitoring partner: mediaTRUST
The local editions of the festival, taking place in the 7 other cities are carried out in Brașov with the support of the Local Council of Brașov, through the program “Project co-financed by the Brașov Local Council”, in Cluj-Napoca with the support of the Local Council of Cluj Napoca, the City Hall of Cluj Napoca and the “Suedia” Association, in Sibiu in partnership with ASTRA Film Festival, in Arad through the program “Co-financed by The Municipal Cultural Center Arad”, in Timișoara with the support of the City Hall of Timișoara, The Cultural House Of The City Of Timișoara and the Philharmonic of Banat, in Iași with the support of The City Hall of Iași and the Athenaeum, and in Suceava with the help of the City Hall of Suceava.
*The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or the way in which the results of the project can be used. This is entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
