Shadows – dark dramas, sci-fi spoofs and shocking films

Revenge, psychologic dramas, sci-fi parodies and unexpected approaches to horror, thriller, western and detective genre film are to be found this year in Transilvania IFF’s darkest and most daring sections: Shadows and No Limit. For the first time, the stories presented in Shadows Shorts will not be running as opening films to the Competition screenings, but rather in their own dedicated slots. Audiences will be delighted by these 12 closely-selected shorts, under the “Everyone dies. Fast” slogan.

The films in Shadows Shorts are “cerebral, profound, with rightfully scary stories, but quite a few will also make you laugh, such as El bosque negro or The Obvious Child”, declares the programmer of the section, Mihai Mitrică. From the new excellent short by renowned Mexicon screenwriter and director Guillermo Arriaga, Broken Night, to the Norwegian silent film Autumn Harvest, a black-and-white odyseey depicting the hallucinations of a sailor from the Farthest North to the surreal and highly original The Stomach, about how we communicate with the land of the dead – the films in Shadows Shorts are always surprising.

The Shadow Shorts jury is comprised of Jose Miguel Beltran Sanchez, director of the San Sebastian Horror and Fantasy Film Festival, Stig Frode Henriksen, actor who can be seen in Norvegian horror Dead Snow, and the Hungarian artist Gyula Havancsák. The GAV Agency is responsible for the section’s visual campaign.

Shadows Shorts is presented by ShortsTV.

Shadows Shorts Teaser:

In Shadows Features, among the films selected by Transilvania IFF artistic director Mihai Chirilov is Haemoo (d. Shim Sung-bo), a thriller with a sensitive topic – human trafficking. Premiered in Toronto and with Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer) as producer and co-writer, the film “turns a real-life tragedy into a comment on social inequality and the cost of survival”, according to “Variety”. From Japan comes, in international premiere, a drama with accents of horror, The Revenge Channel (d. Hisatake Kikkawa), in which a class reunion leads to extreme violence, when three friends decide to punish those who aggressed them during school.

A modern Western set in the Kerry provence takes Irish cinema out of its confort zone. In his debut, Darkness on the Edge of Town, director Patrick Ryan proposes a story with many unexpected turns, for audiences and protagonists alike, when a teenage girl decides to avenge the death of her estranged sister. Another crime story is that presented by novelist Eric Cherrière, for the first time behind the camera for Cruel, a fascinating noir drama which depicts the motivations of a serial killer. From the Berlinale comes Sibylle (d. Michael Krummenacher), a psychological thriller in which the life of an architect is completely turned upside-down when she witnesses an accident during her vacation. Also from Germany, with its strong black-and-white cinematography, comes the romantic horror True Love Ways (d. Mathieu Seiler), which captivatingly transitions from an intimate couple portrait to a macabre cat-and-mouse chase.

The list of unconventional productions at Transilvania IFF is completed by the final confirmed titles in the No Limit line-up. Navajazo (d. Ricardo Silva), awarded the Golden Leopard  at Locarno 2014, is a mix between documentary and dystopic fiction, in which the characters are supposed to survive in a hostile environment, at the border between the USA and Mexico; Dyke Hard – a completely irreverent musical science fiction parody about a lesbian rock band, also presented in TIFF Campus, and German Angst, a shocking omnibus in three parts, with stories of love, sex and death in a mystical version of Berlin. The Chambermaid Lynn is a modern fable about fetishism in which the protagonists make up a surprising duo: an obsessive-compulsive maid and a domineering and androgine sex worker. The list of films can be consulted here.

Supernova, features the latest winner of the Golden Lion in Venice – the new film by the undisputed master of absurd humor, Roy Andersson –A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. For the same section, Transilvania IFF lined up the most recent films by Christian Petzold and Alexei Gherman Jr. Distributed in Romania by Macondo, Phoenix, winner of the FIPRESCI Prize la San Sebastián, with a screenplay co-written by Harun Farocki, is the story of a Jewish singer who survived the Holocaust, but turned out completely disfigured. Gherman’s drama, Under Electric Clouds, gives a look at Russia in the year 2017, one hundred years after the revolution which led to the formation of the Soviet Union. Details about all 34 films can be found here.