The Gala was presented by Tudor Giurgiu, the president of the festival, who thanked the 2500 attendees for "the highest audience to a Transilvania IFF opening ever" and said that “the online selling process has surpassed all expectations, with a double number of tickets sold in comparison to last year”.
Some of the guests of this year's opening gala were Emil Boc, the Mayor of Cluj; His Excellency, Claudio Pérez Paladino, the ambassador of Argentina in Romania; the Economic Counselor of the US Embassy in Bucharest, Michael Stewart, and Walter Donado, one of the star of Wilds Tales, which will premiere theatrically on June 12. Ambassador Claudio Pérez Paladino presented the Focus Argentina section and announced a new partnership between Transilvania IFF and Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival - BAFICI, which will reciprocally screen each other’s winners every year from now on.
Tudor Giurgiu then introduced this year's locations and events: TIFF Campus – launched as part of Cluj – 2015 European Youth Capital; Cine-pool – a new concept combining watching cinema with going to the pool, which will take place on June 1, at 8.30pm, at Hotel Belvedere's Club Moving; The Film Warehouse – which will host free-entrance screenings and concerts and will act as playground, fair and summer garden. At the same time, he introduced the 7th edition of EducaTIFF, the program that promotes the importance of cinematic education and the necessity of bringing it into the Romanian schools.
TIFF's Artistic Director, Mihai Chirilov, said that people shouldn't miss Rams, the winner of the Un Certain Regard Award in Cannes, the films in the Supernova section, "a best-of of the last 12 months in terms of film festivals", the Mircea Daneliuc retrospective – "I encourage you to discover the works of this great Romanian filmmaker and then, in Unirii Square, you should come to see the most recent Romanian film to win in Cannes, Corneliu Porumboiu's The Treasure. I hope you will be as many as you are today".
Unirii Square was filled with tango rhythms thanks to a flash mob organized by Cluj's Tango Company. The street-theatre troupe Compagnie des Quidams, which has thus returned to Cluj after 4 years, presented a fragment from their new, unique, musical and visual show "FierS à Cheval". The full show will be performed at the Banffy Castle in Bontida, on Saturday, May 30, from 8.30pm. The Weekend at the Castle section will also host the Romanian premiere of the highly anticipated documentary about Nirvana's late leader, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck; a Zenzile cine-concert, who will offer live musical support to the documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), and a series of workshops and games for kids, reunited under the title The Citadel of the Little Entrepreneurs.
Another segment of the Gala was focused on a special musical and cinematic event: the screening The Exile, by Michael Curtiz, with live score by the Hungarian Opera of Cluj, on Tuesday, June 2, from 8.30pm. The film has a very particular story: 100 years ago, Cluj was the Hollywood of Transilvania. Director/producer Jenő Janovics had transformed the city into a huge studio. In the summer of 1914, under his careful guidance, Kertész Mihály was shooting one of his first films... 28 years later, under the name of Michael Curtiz, Mihály would win the Oscar for Casablanca. Throughout the years, his early films got lost. The Exile survived in a basement and was found by sheer miracle. 100 years later, the Cluj audience will finally watch the film...
