Starting this year, the TIFF Cinematheque at Cinema Victoria Cluj-Napoca is launching a unique quarterly program, offering Carte Blanche to a film critic who will present a curated selection of event films: premieres, classic titles, or rare gems from their personal favorites archive. The first module will take place from March to May 2025, featuring two screenings in the last week of each month, on Thursdays and Saturdays, followed by open discussions with the cinematheque’s programmer and special guests. Organizers believe this is the best way to regularly satisfy the taste for quality films, cultivated and fueled annually—but only momentarily—by the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF). This initiative offers cinephiles the opportunity to discover or revisit significant films from recent history and cinematic treasures, while also engaging in informal post-screening conversations with the Cinematheque team.
The first guest of this program is film critic Mihai Chirilov, TIFF’s artistic director:
“There are many recent films that, for objective reasons, were not screened at TIFF or in Romania but are worth rediscovering, presenting, and analyzing. At the same time, there are also classic titles or hidden rarities that any critic or film curator with an archeologist’s passion should be curious to revisit and recontextualize, as well as discover to enrich their cinematic universe. March is dedicated to a double feature of collector’s rarities: Murdering the Devil (dir. Ester Krumbachová, Czechoslovakia) and Little Murders (dir. Alan Arkin, USA), two black comedies from the 1970s—terribly subversive and refreshingly anarchic, especially in today’s context. This will be followed in April by two recent documentaries offering a unique perspective on cinema, and in May by two ‘appetizer’ films anticipating new sections at TIFF this June.”
Tickets for the screenings are now available online: https://www.cinemavictoria.ro/