Transilvania IFF 2026: Official Competition and What’s Up, Doc? line-ups revealed

• Lionel (dir. Carlos Saiz, Spain) - an experiment on both sides of the lens: a road movie built around a script the cast never saw, yet one that arrives at a universal truth about fathers and sons;

• The Night is Fading Away (dir. Ezequiel Salinas, Ramiro Sonzini, Argentina) - a bittersweet love letter to cinema, in which a displaced projectionist takes a job as a night watchman at a cinema and gradually builds an unlikely community around old films;

• Truly Naked (dir. Muriel d’Ansembourg, Netherlands) – the film makes nudity and sex matter-of-fact, then pivots to the harder question: whether shedding your clothes is the same as opening yourself up;

• Titanic Ocean (dir. Konstantina Kotzamani, Greece) – the film follows young women training to become professional mermaids in a world that never stops demanding reinvention.

• Butterfly (dir. Itonje Søimer Guttormsen, Norway) – the story tracks two sisters working through the long shadow of a guru mother, with self-knowledge serving as the film’s uneasy currency;

• My Father's Shadow (dir. Akinola Davies jr, UK) – the film operates as a dream-memory of a political turning point and how it echoes through one family across generations;

• Our Father (dir. Goran Stankovic, Serbia) – the film examines the cult of a surrogate patriarch at a Serbian monastery for recovering addicts, and the difficulty of dismantling something that can’t be entirely condemned;

• The Red Hangar (dir. Juan Pablo Sallato, Chile) - a lean, pressure-cooker thriller about honour and duty during the Pinochet coup, remarkable for how much it achieves with limited means;

What’s Up, Doc? Competition

Now in its fifth year as a dedicated competition within Transilvania IFF, the What’s Up, Doc? section brings together ten titles that span the full range of what documentary can be: alongside straight-format films, this year’s selection takes in a coyote animation, a poetic hybrid, a model of investigative journalism, and a tongue-in-cheek B-movie series.

“For all their geographic range — from America to Morocco, Mexico to South Africa, the former Soviet Union to present-day Israel — the films in competition (eight of them debuts) keep returning to the same ground: love, the need for closeness, and above all, Truth. The place where differences dissolve and only human experience remains, in all its ambiguity 

- Crăița Nanu, What’s Up, Doc? Curator

The What’s Up Doc? films:

• We Were Left Alone (dir. Adrián Canoura, Spain) - a son’s letter to his sailor father — formally unusual, repetitive by design, part experimental film and part immersive installation: love rendered through absence, forgiveness rendered through form;
• Goodbye Sisters (dir. Alexander Murphy, France) - a film that manages to be both painterly and clear-eyed about family and fate;
• Bouchra (dir. Orian Yani Barki, Meriem Bennani, USA) - a coming-out story told with disarming honesty and transformed into a distinctive animated film;
  Motel Paraiso (dir. Jose Eduardo Castilla Ponce, Mexico) - takes an equally playful approach, casting a pair of eccentric grandparents as the unwitting stars of their own B-movie franchise, with warmth and genuine comic invention;

• Hex (dir. Maja Holand, Norway) - the true story of three friends who vow to become famous as witches and a heavy metal band;

• Variations on a Theme (dir. Jason Jacobs, Devon Delmar, South Africa) - a hybrid part poem, part excavation, set in South Africa, tracing how betrayal, buried under years of silence, continues to travel across generations;

• Of Mud And Blood (dir. Jean-Gabriel Leynaud, France) – a story of exploitation set in the Congo, with a Steinbeckian eye for the smallness of dreams against the large scale of abuse;

• The Seoul Guardians (dir. Kim Jong-Woo, Kim Shin-Wan, Cho Chul-Young, South Korea) - a live-action reminder that democratic power is never more than one crowd’s determination;

Memory (dir. Vladlena Sandu, France) - a quietly astonishing walk through one child’s experience of the Soviet collapse and a family stretched between Chechnya and Crimea;

Far From Maine (dir. Roy Cohen, France) - one of the most rigorous and genuinely open-handed arguments for peace in recent documentary cinema;

***

The Transilvania International Film Festival is organized by the Romanian Film Promotion Association and the Transilvania Film Festival Association.

Supported by: Ministry of Culture, National Film Centre, Cluj-Napoca City Hall and Local Council, Romanian Cultural Institute, Dacin Sara, UCIN, Department of Inter-Ethnic Relations – DRI, Floreşti Municipality, Creative Europe – MEDIA

Under the auspices of: UNESCO City of Film

Presented by: Banca Transilvania

Sponsors: Mastercard, Vodafone, LIDL Romania, Ursus, Regina Maria, Audi & Autoworld, MOL Romania, Pepsi, DeLonghi, Adrem, Jidvei, Nikon, Alstom, Emerson, McDonald’s, Farmec, Radisson Blu, Iulius Mall, Conceptual Lab by Theo Nissim, Teilor, Linde, CSI, ECCO, Nova Power

Official Coffee: Nespresso

Official Beauty Partner: Armani Beauty

Official Insurer: Groupama

Technology Partner: Reea

Hospitality Partner: Eximtur

Partners: Bolt, PMA, Promelek, Intend, Lecom, Luna Cleaning, Cărtureşti, Mobexpert, Supecom, Goto Parking

Main Media Partner: PRO TV & VOYO

Recommended by: ROCK FM

Monitoring Partner: MediaTRUST

Media Partners: Radio România Cultural, TV5, Adevărul de Weekend, A LIST, Agerpres, Hotnews, Liternet, Observator Cultural, Revista FILM, Zile şi Nopți

International Media Partners: Variety, Screen International