Beside the titles already announced for this year (Après mai - Olivier Assayas, Laurence Anyways - Xavier Dolan, Like Someone in Love - Abbas Kiarostami and Foxfire - Laurent Cantet), there will be a lot of other "must see" movies.
A dear friend of TIFF, Sebastián Lelio, returns to Cluj with Gloria, the movie which brought to its protagonist, Paulina Garcia, the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival. Lelio won the Transylvania Trophy in 2007 for La Sagrada Familia. He also won the FIPRESCI Prize in 2010 for Navidad. Gloria, the portrait of a 58-year-old divorcee hoping to meet someone new, was also distinguished with the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Berlin.
Hadas Yaron, awarded for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, plays Shira, an 18-year-old set to enter into an arranged marriage and who must decide whether to marry her brother-in-law after her sister dies in childbirth. Fill the Void is set in the Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic world in Tel Aviv and represented Israel in the Foreign Language race of the Oscars.
Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2012 Venice Film Festival, Pietà by Kim Ki-duk is a brutal psychological drama about the combative relationship between a nefarious debt collector and a mysterious woman who claims to be his biological mother. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language. New World/Sinsegye, directed by Park Hoon-jung, is a noir movie who was a box office hit in South Korea and which is already set for a Hollywood remake. From Asia comes Thy Womb by the renowned filmmaker Brillante Mendoza. It is an emotional drama of a couple who use a surrogate mother; the film was selected in 20 festivals, including Venice - where it won three independent juries awards.
Betrayal/ Izmena, by Kirill Serebrennikov, was highly praised for Franziska Petri's acting and for its directing style. The Venice-selected Betrayal is a story about a man and woman who discover that their partners are cheating on them. In the Name Of / Wimię... , by Małgorzata Szumowska, is an extremely intense drama about a Catholic priest who falls for a young from his parish. The Polish movie was selected in the 2013 Berlin competition. Vic et Flo ont vu un ours, directed by Denis Côté, involves a relationship between two former prison mates, and it won the Alfred Bauer Prize at Berlin International Film Festival in 2013.
Another must see movie is Much Ado About Nothin, a surprisingly modern adaptation of Shakespeare's play. Directed by Joss Whedon (he also directed the Hollywood blockbuster The Avengers), the low budget movie enjoyed a lot of positive critical reviews. The Deep/ Djúpið, by Baltasar Kormákur, was on the short list for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and won multiple awards in Iceland. It is a real-life story about a shipwreck and one man's battle to stay alive. Circles/ Krugovi, directed by Srdan Golubovic, is a story about five people connected by a tragic event. Three parallel stories take place and follow characters who face their past twenty years later. It won a jury special mention in the international fiction film selection of Sundance Film Festival and the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Berlin (Forum Section).
