04/06/2019 - A total of 55 features will be available online for Romanian audiences to enjoy, starting 6 June

After yearly efforts to broaden the festival’s potential audience, the Transilvania International Film Festival (31 May-9 June, Cluj-Napoca) is taking a decisive step: it is going online with the VoD platform TIFF Unlimited, which is being promoted under the slogan “The festival must go on. Anytime. Online”. The platform will kick off with a portfolio of 55 titles, the majority of them European, which will be available for various monthly subscriptions ranging from €5 per month to €65 per year. The portfolio will be updated with new titles twice a month. 

“We’ve been wanting to extend the TIFF experience with the online medium for a long time, because the audience wishes either to watch films from the festival again or to check out movies they have missed. TIFF Unlimited is the vehicle that offers film lovers – whether or not they have attended the gathering – their own festival in their own homes,” said Tudor Giurgiu, the festival's president, in a soon-to-be-issued press release. As for artistic director Mihai Chirilov, he enthuses about the selection, talking about “courageous films, either radical or controversial, from various genres and sociopolitical contexts, but also intimate and special movies, such as those from this year's official competition”. 

Among the available titles are László Nemes' Son of Saul [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: László Nemes
interview: László Rajk
film profile], Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue Is the Warmest Colour [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Abdellatif Kechiche
film profile], Grímur Hákonarson's Rams [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Grimur Hakonarson
film profile], Benedikt Erlingsson's Woman at War [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Benedikt Erlingsson
interview: Benedikt Erlingsson
film profile] and Tonia Mishiali's Pause [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tonia Mishiali
film profile], the latter two films forming part of this year's official selection. 

TIFF Unlimited is one part of a constant effort to show the selected films to audiences who were not able to attend the festival. Besides various, briefer local editions (in Bucharest and the cities of Sibiu, Oradea and Miercurea-Ciuc), the festival also organises the TIFF Caravan, screening films for free in 15 Romanian towns (in 2018), many of them without a single active cinema.