Ferentari is a run-down neighbourhood in Bucharest largely inhabited by Roma. "The closest to a ghetto you can get in contemporary Romania", according to director Ivana Mladenovic. This is where she sets her fiction feature debut, a modern Romeo and Juliet – or rather Romeo and Julio. Ferentari is not somewhere you’d expect to find an introverted academic like 40-year-old Adi. The anthropologist comes to the area soon after being dumped to study the Roma pop music, manele. Adi needs help navigating this shady, often mob-related, world and finds this in kind-hearted criminal Alberto.
As do many contemporary Romanian filmmakers, this originally Serb director plays an intriguing game with fact and fiction in her film, which is populated by amateur actors from Ferentari. Soldiers. Story from Ferentari is based on the eponymous, semi-autobiographical book by Adrian Schiop, who also plays the lead in this loose adaptation.
Programme
A selection of discoveries for the future. Emerging talent with original subject matter and an individual style. Includes the Bright Future Competition for first feature films.
Read more about this programmeNot a word is said about the absent mother. Nor about the summer that glides past and will probably be the last that physics teacher Todor and his children Mila and Niki will spend together. A minor family drama told with a light-hearted tone, floating on almost matter-of-fact melancholy.
82'
Bulgaria
IFFR 2018
A mysterious stranger fascinates the clients of a South-American holiday resort. He starts performing miracles on the spot. Who is he? A weird, funny, Zen-like satire on mass tourism, as if simultaneously directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Monty Python (circa The Meaning of Life).
84'
Canada
IFFR 2018
Comprised of a series of dream-like episodes beginning with a woman waking up with an insect stuck to her head, Tiger Award winner Ikeda Akira (Anatomy of a Paper Clip) balances otherworldly strangeness with Japanese social pressures in this offbeat comedy that amuses and bewilders in equal measure.
93'
Japan
IFFR 2018