This year I didn’t get to go to Cluj, at TIFF. Transylvania International Film Festival, that is.
Not going means you don’t get to see a lot of great films, since they aren’t, actually, distributed and screened in the cinema in Romania. Some of them, yes, find their way to the cinema screen, but so few… While others, if they pass the test of time, get to Cinemax a few years later. Especially the European, recipe productions.
But TIFF, for me, is not only the thirty-something films I get to see in a week or so. TIFF is meeting friends, recognizing them, ten rows in front of me or behind that pillar in Cinema Arta, behind a counter or rushing somewhere to solve something.
But more than anything, TIFF means party. Party all night long, for those who still have it inside them, in a vast array of places, some of them fixed, some of them, different, each year. That means, the HBO party will always happen on the lake, the gulyas party on Romanian Thursday, in the courtyard of the museum, Banffy Castle in Bontida, with its traditional film, music and food night, then there are the Baracca, Aroma, Diesel and all those place – like Hotel Panorama - where people meet, talk, sing, dance, eat and... well, you name it.
I miss Cluj...
