From Cannes to Transilvania IFF.25: The Croisette titles coming to Cluj

One of the year’s most anticipated films, Minotaur marks director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s return after almost a decade away from filmmaking. Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, the film is inspired by La femme infidèle (Claude Chabrol, 1969) and follows a company executive caught between professional pressures, the collapse of his family life and the brutal realities of contemporary Russia. For the director behind modern classics such as The Return, The Banishment and Leviathan, this is also the first feature made outside Russia. Speaking about Minotaur, Zvyagintsev said: “It was the perfect pretext to say some important things.” Minotaur will later be released in Romania by Bad Unicorn.

Presented in Quinzaine des Cinéastes, Diary of a Chambermaid (dir. Radu Jude, 2026) offers one of the most unexpected reinterpretations of a classic literary work in recent years. The film follows a young Romanian woman (Ana Dumitrașcu) living in France, where she takes care of a family’s child in Bordeaux while her own daughter, left at home with her grandmother, counts down the days until her mother returns for Christmas. In her spare time, she rehearses for a stage production inspired by Octave Mirbeau’s novel. As with much of Jude’s cinema, social satire, playful intersections between literature, theatre and film, and biting commentary merge into something impossible to categorize

After his recent English-language detours, Pedro Almodóvar returns to Spanish with Bitter Christmas, which premiered in Competition at Cannes: a commercial director transforms the grief following her mother’s death into creative material, while, in parallel, a filmmaker struggling with creative block begins writing about her, creating a game of autofiction where lived experience and imagined realities constantly mirror one another. Bitter Christmas and Diary of a Chambermaid will be distributed in Romania by Independența Film.

For audiences looking for more extreme experiences, the Full Moon section brings Species (dir. Marion Le Corroller), which had its world premiere in the Midnight Screenings section at Cannes. Its protagonist is an intern working in a hospital emergency department, where every shift means relentless pressure and split-second decisions. One day, the hospital begins receiving young patients with strange symptoms that defy medical explanation. As the cases multiply, she discovers that her own body is beginning to undergo equally inexplicable changes.