The Teen Spirit Jury at TIFF.25
As part of the Teen Spirit section at TIFF, 14 young people from Cluj, aged between 16 and 20, will serve this year as jurors for the competition dedicated to films for young audiences. They will decide the winner of the Youth Award, presented to the most acclaimed title in the selection at the Transilvania International Film Festival (June 12–21, Cluj-Napoca).
The jury members are Noémi Kitti Danci-Sallak, Matei Lostun, Horea Hudin, Anca Pastramă, Ecaterina Pop-Curșeu, Matei Fedorec, Camelia Zaharia, Riana Maxim, Matei Someșan, Alisa Blaj, Bianca Docolina, Dragoș Mare, Roxana Tălpășan, and Andrei Bar.
This year’s selection brings together stories of adolescence and coming of age, spanning very different social and geographical contexts—from family dynamics and identity pressures to fragile friendships and radical choices that alter the course of a life.
In On Our Own (dir. Tudor Jurgiu, Romania), the world is seen through the eyes of teenagers growing up without parental support, forced to create their own forms of family while balancing responsibility and the desire for freedom. The fragility of these formative years is also explored in School Year (dir. Laura Samani, Italy), where the arrival of a new student at a technical high school in Trieste radically changes the dynamics of a group of boys accustomed to their own rules.
Questions of identity and belonging take center stage in Between Two Worlds (dir. Viv Li, Germany), where a young woman struggles to find her place between two cultures pulling her in opposite directions. In The Sundays (dir. Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, Spain), a teenager’s decision to enter a cloistered convent confronts her family with uncomfortable questions about freedom, faith, and control.
Relationships between teenage girls are explored in a tense and emotionally charged way in Sad Girls (dir. Fernanda Tovar, Mexico), where a traumatic event during a summer night shatters the fragile balance between two close friends, each responding differently to guilt and anger. In a completely different register, My Daughter Is a Zombie (dir. Pil Gam-Sung, South Korea) turns an absurd apocalypse into a story about a father trying to protect his daughter in a world spiraling out of control.
The tension between desire, identity, and social pressure resurfaces in Skiff (dir. Cecilia Verheyden, Belgium), where a teenage girl long regarded as “one of the boys” on her rowing team finds herself confronted with feelings that unsettle both her home life and her place within the team. In Animol (dir. Ashley Walters, United Kingdom), reality is even harsher: a teenager in a detention center must navigate an environment shaped by violence and shifting loyalties while trying not to lose sight of who he was before he arrived there.
In The Atomic Kid (dir. Joren Molter, the Netherlands), social isolation drives a teenager toward an obsession with chemistry that initially brings him attention online but quickly spirals out of control. Meanwhile, Weightless (dir. Emilie Thalund, Denmark) follows the subtle transformation of a 15-year-old girl at a weight-loss camp that promises change but exposes vulnerabilities she never anticipated.
Teen Spirit continues TIFF’s series of programs dedicated to young audiences, alongside MiniTIFF—which will take place this autumn—and the online project Cinema Hour, which promotes the use of film as an educational tool in middle and high schools.
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The Transilvania International Film Festival is organized by the Romanian Film Promotion Association and the Transilvania Film Festival Association.
