With a name inspired by the Depeche Mode song Enjoy the Silence, this section brings 11 films which will compete for FIPRESCI award, offered by the International Federation of Film Critics. Another 5 films will be screened in The Usual Suspects section focused on directors who came to Cluj with their first films and who are now part of the TIFF family.
"The idea of this section came to me thanks to two films from last year, two films which are completely without lines: Moebius, Kim Ki-duk's psycho-sexual drama we screened during TIFF 2014, and The Tribe, the provoking Ukrainian debut film from the TIFF 2015 selection, whose story takes place in the world of the deaf and the mute. The title of this section, inspired by the lyrics of the Depeche Mode song Enjoy the Silence, was kind of obvious, but this doesn't mean that all these 11 films are completely silent. I was interested – and it was a provocation to find them – in those films in which words are unnecessary and whose power resides in the force and the narrative flux of the images", says Mihai Chirilov, the artistic director of TIFF.
As Mihai Chirilov himself says, some films are completely without words: Days of Gray, a post-apocalyptic Icelandic SciFi which seems taken out from one of the Sigur Rós videos; Test, the story of the first nuclear experiment in the Soviet steppe; Nude Area, a highly sensorial study of the stages through which an Amsterdam couple goes; Brazilian Dream, a visceral Dada-style documentary filled with gripping surreal images.
In other films, there are some lines, but all of them said off camera: Labour of Love, the debut film awarded the Best Director prize in Venice, 24 hours in the life of an Indian couple who work in shifts and never get to meet; Ruined Love, the ecstatic Filipino punk opera with a lot of music, but in which the main characters of these love story – a murderer and a prostitute – never talk.
Very few words are also spoken in the Georgian film Corn Island, the story of a floating island and the destinies that reproduce the natural life cycle; in the Greek film Forever, a sort of Brief Encounter between two souls who share the same train journey every day, in the Argentinean film Dog Lady, in which a women has chosen to live at the edge of society, surrounded by dogs; in the Short Plays omnibus – directed, among others, by Gaspar Noé, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas and Vincent Gallo – dedicated to the Brazilian World Cup; Parabellum, a postmodern fable about the end of the world in which a group of Argentineans learn survival techniques in a training camp and in which the protagonists never says a word.
