The 20th edition of the ANONIMUL International Independent Film Festival will take place between August 14 – 20 in Sfântu Gheorghe, the Danube Delta. This year’s program includes two short film competitions, national and international, out-of-competition screenings, and meetings with filmmakers.

The Romanian short film competition includes 12 titles: Where No Ships Go (dir. Vlad Buzăianu), Alibaba (dir. Vlad Popa), Night Practice (dir. Bogdan Alexandru), Appalachia (dir. Roxana Stroe), Berliner Kindl (dir. Lucia Chicoş), Our Summer Break (dir. Lara Ionescu), Karina (dir. Ilinca Hărnuţ), Remote (dir. Dana Rogoz), Sasha (dir. Serghei Chiviriga), Keep the Distance (dir. Cecilia Ștefănescu), Venus (dir. Carina-Gabriela Daşoveanu), I Want to Shatter the Greenhouse (dir. Teona Galgoţiu).

“This year’s selection, dominated by female filmmakers, shows that there are more and more female voices in Romanian cinema, and that’s encouraging. Part of it is represented by student films, announcing a new generation of talents worth following. The rest are equally promising films by directors who are now embarking on their filmmaking journey. I hope the selection will surprise the audience as much as the freshness of the films surprised me,” says Ionuț Mareș, film critic and curator of the competition program.

The feature films presented outside the competition include Refuge (dir. Liviu Mărghidan), Arsenie. An Amazing Afterlife (dir. Alexandru Solomon), Nora (dir. Carla Teaha), Between Revolutions (dir. Vlad Petri), Day of the Tiger (dir. Andrei Tănase), Mammalia (dir. Sebastian Mihăilescu), To the North (dir. Mihai Mincan), Phoenix. Har/Jar (dir. Cornel Mihalache),  All the Rivers Flow into the Sea and the Sea Never Fills Up (dir. Claudiu Mitcu).

The renowned Japanese director Naomi Kawase is coming to Romania for the first time as the special guest of this year’s edition of ANONIMUL. Her debut film Suzaku was awarded the Caméra d’Or award at Cannes in 1997, making Kawase, 27 at the time, the youngest filmmaker to win the this prize. In 2007, she won the Grand Prix at Cannes for Mogari No Mori (The Mourning Forest).

The festival will host a Naomi Kawase Retrospective, where the public will have the opportunity to (re)visit important titles from the director’s oeuvre, such as Futatsume no mado (Still the Water), An (Sweet Bean), Hikari (Radiance), Asa ga kuru (True Mothers), and the Official Film of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. During the closing ceremony, the filmmaker will be honored with the ANONIMUL Trophy for her contribution to the beauty of world cinema. Moreover, at the end of the retrospective, Naomi Kawase will hold a masterclass, which will be open to the festival goers.

Melissa Antonescu

Writer, photographer and videographer. For Films in Frame she writes news about the latest happenings in the film world and brings to the readers' attention the productions that can be seen at the cinema. When she's not writing articles, she's photographing people in a small studio or searching for new cake recipes.