It's an edition focused on first time directors – 10 of the competition titles belong to directors making their feature length directorial debut. The competitive section is traditionally focused on first and second time directors, and the 12 films come from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Uruguay, Poland, Sweden, SUA, Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands, India, Slovakia, and Japan.
Probably the boldest debut film in the competition is Wadjda (by Haifaa Al-Mansour), the first feature film entirely shot in Saudi Arabia and, as if it were not enough, it is made by a woman. In order to film the story of a young girl which takes part in a Quran memorization contest in order to buy herself a bicycle – a perfect occasion for the director to make an elaborate and touching portrait of the woman's status in the Muslim world based on her own adolescence – Haifaa Al-Mansour had to wait for years and subject herself to numerous restrictions. In 2012, the film received three awards in Venice and the Dubai International Film Festival trophy.
Also bold is the Polish director Tomasz Wasilewski who manages to avoid the stereotypes of genre-filmmaking in In a Bedroom/ W Sypialni, a psychological drama about a 40 year old prostitute who secures money and little pleasure after making her clients fall asleep. The film was screened in 2012 at Karlovy Vary. A complex and ambitious film brings us the famous Indian playwright Anand Gandhi – Ship of Theseus, a meditation on identity, justice, beauty, death, via three characters: an experimental photographer, a monk and a broker.
Made in Ash/ Až do mesta Aš (by Iveta Grófová), Slovacia's Oscar entry, talks forthrightly, in a documentary-like style, about women on the edge between life and death. The thriller Call Girl (by Mikael Marcimain) tackles an uncomfortable topic inspired by a 1970 political scandal which took place in Sweden – the Minister of Justice had sex with an underage prostitute. The film was nominated eleven times for the Sweden Film Industry Awards and received the FIPRESCI award in Toronto and the Audience Award in Stockholm.
Breaking Horizons/ Am himmel der tag (by Pola Beck), winner of the Best Film award in Zurich, explores the life of a young pregnant woman who takes a radical decision for fear she might find herself all alone and without a purpose. Also about womanhood, but in a different stage of life – the adolescence – speaks, in a delicate, sincere and sometimes sarcastic manner Eliza Hitman's Sundance-selected It Felt like Love. And Tanta agua/ So Much Water (by Ana Guevara & Leticia Jorge), screened in Berlin and San Sebastian, focuses on the useless attempts of a father at entertaining his children in a short vacation ruined by heavy rain. The film will be distributed in Romania by Transilvania Film.
I Catch a Terrible Cat / Koppidoi neko (by Rikiya Imaizumi) is quite unusual for Japanese cinema: a romantic comedy about a 60 year old writer who, hit with writer's block, goes to various pubs and falls into trouble. A lot of humor, but of a different kind, is to be found in The Deflowering of Eva van End (by Michiel ten Horn), an absurdist satire about the "petite bourgeoisie".
The only second time directors in the TIFF competition are Tobias Lindholm (A Hijacking / Kapringen) and Michael Noer (Northwest/ Nordvest). Good friends (Lindholm is one of the regular collaborators of Thomas Vinterberg), they debutet together with the prison drama R (2010) and went their separate ways with A Hijacking, the story of the capturing of a Danish ship by Somalian pirates and Northwest, a violent thriller focused on two adolescents from a Copenhagen suburb.
The jury consists of Cristi Puiu, the author of TIFF 2013 visual campaign, the Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi, author of the celebrated Taxidermia (2006), the actress Franziska Petri, internationally acclaimed in Venice for her turn Betrayal/ Izmena (by Kirill Serebrennikov), which will be screened in the Supernova section, Frederic Boyer, artistic director of Tribeca Film Festival (New York), and the renowned British producer Lynda Myles, the head of the Fiction-Directing department of the National Film and Television School, former vice-president of Columbia Pictures and co-author of the book „The Movie Brats”.
