The 23rd Transylvania International Film Festival through an AGE-C perspective
Founded in 2002, Romania’s first international feature film festival, usually abbreviated as TIFF (not to confuse with its namesake from Toronto) has become one of the most prominent film events – not solely in the country but also in Central and Eastern Europe – connecting film industry players, film journalists, academicians and film enthusiasts from all over the world. Although Bucharest, the capital city of Romania is the central node of national film production, the president of the festival, film director Tudor Giurgiu decided to initialize TIFF at Cluj-Napoca, the heart of Transylvania, a quickly developing university city with a rich, multi-ethnic present and history.
Bearing in mind – even unconsciously – our AGE-C project, at this year’s edition (which took place between 14-24 June) I started to wonder: how often is ageing thematised and/or represented by ageing actors and subjects? Considering that hundreds of films are screened each year in various categories – offering cine-concerts, career retrospectives, and films related to a specific genre or national cinema among others – I thought that by taking a look specifically at the festival’s competition sections (arguably the most crucial and prestigious part of the festival) could be interesting since these sections underline the selection committee’s relation towards contemporary global cinema. It must be added though that TIFF is hugely committed to focusing on new and emerging voices, thus, both the fiction and the documentary competition welcome only debut and second feature films.
Taking into account that filmmakers in the early stages of their careers are generally young adults, it is not unusual for the fiction film competition to have multiple coming-of-age stories, spotlighting teenagers – see Transilvania Trophy winners such as Babyteeth (2019), The Whaler Boy (2020) or Girls Will Be Girls (2024). However, during the 23rd edition, out of the 12 competition films, a third presented late middle-aged or older characters, occasionally thematising age-related issues in an unmistakable manner. Staring with an Iranian film, Oktay Baraheni’s The Old Bachelor (2024) follows an elderly abusive father and his two middle-aged sons, sharing an apartment together. Ironically, the ‘old’ in the title refers to the older son, who is still unmarried, while the father (presumably in his late 60s) is already looking for his third wife. The problem is they are both eyeing for the same woman. Intergenerational child-parent relationships between Second and Third Agers are also addressed in The Permanent Picture (2023), a Spanish-French co-production directed by Laura Ferrés. Here, a casting director in her 50s goes to Andalusia for a job-related manner, where she unwittingly befriends an elderly woman, who is actually her mother. Continuing with Anaïs Tellenne’s The Dreamer (2024), this French film delves into an age-related topic that is still largely considered a controversial, taboo subject, namely: sex and desire in later life. The 58-year-old, one-eyed main character is a caretaker on double duty: he is in charge of a huge mansion and also of his elderly mother, yet his routine days come to an end with the appearance of the estate’s heiress, a mysterious artist, who will soon find her newest muse in the ageing man. Finally, the Chinese film Day Tripper (2023), directed by Yanqi Chen, is more of a mosaic story, presenting different characters and generations, nevertheless, one of the narrative threads concentrates on a man in his late middle age, who loses his job and is replaced by a young person, hence thematising ageism in the workplace.
Turning to the documentary competition (cleverly titled ‘What’s Up Doc?’), one can see even from this small sample – a total of 10 films – that the presumption according to which ageing is more palpable in documentary films, is once again validated since half of them present ageing subjects, although issues related to ageing are thematised in different amplitudes – some films showing more thematic salience than others. Starting on a high note in terms of relevance, Zara Zerny’s touching Danish documentary, Echo of You (2023), focuses on a group of widowers (all of them above 80), who contemplate on their lost loved ones, the power of memory and the uncanny presence of their spouses, even after their tragic passing. Love in later life also plays an important role in Casablanca (2023), a French documentary by Adriano Valerio, which presents a couple in their late 50s, an Italian woman and a Moroccan man from Casablanca, who might be deported from Italy due to a visa issue – hence somewhat echoing Michael Curtiz’s iconic Hollywood film of the same name. Moving toward portrait films, Nikola Klinger’s La Reine (2023) from the Czech Republic presents 73-year-old Ian, a bohemian man, who produces traditional essential oils in France and has a never-ending, although recently more restrained relationship to drugs. Another, this time self-made portrait film from the Netherlands titled Glass, My Unfulfilled Life (2023) is brought by Rogier Kappers, a 52-year-old street musician famished for fame, who – quoting the synopsis of the film – tells his “tragi-comic coming of old age story” (emphasis added). At last, David Boaretto’s April in France (2023) from France represents a rather strange case of representation since it builds on the connection between a 5-year-old girl and her already deceased great-grandfather. Thus, he is an “invisible” character, who nevertheless has a huge influence on the little girl’s life, as she is discovering the village where her great-grandfather lived and the people whom he loved.
Despite TIFF is not deliberately committed to channelling fiction and documentary films in the context of ageing, one can confidently assert that this year’s competition sections offered various examples that cover topics related to ageing and give space to ageing characters, whether fictitious or not. Even these brief exposés confirmed that emerging filmmakers from all over the world are eager to delve into the topic of ageing one way or another, while Mihai Chirilov (the artistic director of the festival) and his team showed much interest in these stories. It surpasses the scope of this blogpost, yet as a final remark it must be mentioned that a more thorough and broader investigation in the future – which considers every past edition of the festival – could also uncover how the representation of ageing changed in these last 20 years in terms of prevalence and thematic trends, outlining how one is aged by (film) culture to paraphrase Gullette (2004).
Written by: Boglárka Angéla Farkas
Image credit: Boglárka Angéla Farkas, TIFF, 2024.