Transylvania International Film Festival is the biggest film festival in Romania, which takes place each June in my home-town, Cluj-Napoca.
So when they invited me to create one of the 5 posters celebrating 25 years of existence, it turned out to be quite an emotional moment. Mostly because the process involved the teenage film goer I was in 2002, the volunteer from 2010 and the grownup who was actually working for the festival în 2014 (I was the exhibitions manager for about 5 years). The result was a love letter to movie theaters and movie audiences alike.
This poster captures a feeling familiar to anyone who’s ever sat in a dark cinema during the festival:
Once a year, in Cluj, every cinema becomes a portal and every passer-by becomes a spectator. We watch the same films, yet each of us sees and feels something different. Someone escapes into fiction. Someone eats popcorn as if they’ve never seen corn before. Someone checks the TIFF schedule on their phone. Someone cries. Someone laughs. Someone decides, right there and then, to become an actor, a director, or a festival volunteer.
The festival is all of us.
