New Partnership with the Ceau, Cinema! Festival

We are pleased to announce a new partnership between the Cross-Border Film Festival Tribute to a Vision and the Ceau, Cinema! Festival, a significant and influential cultural event in Timișoara, Romania. Timișoara was the European Capital of Culture in 2023, and our twin cities of Gorizia and Nova Gorica will hold this title in 2025. Ceau, Cinema! is renowned for its commitment to promoting European and independent cinema, particularly within the multicultural context of the Banat region.

As part of this partnership, our festival's "Excursion" section will be dedicated to Romania this year. This special segment will showcase a selection of Romanian short films, curated by our collaborator Antonio Dagostin. Additionally, a 3D exhibition curated by Fabien Leiba and his team will be hosted at the BorGocinema in Gorizia. We are also honored to welcome film critic and artistic director Ionut Mares, festival director Betty Varga, and festival co-founder Nicoleta Ciocov as our guests.

"The new partnership with the Ceau, Cinema! Festival expands our network of collaborations with festivals operating in multicultural environments and focused primarily on the promotion of auteur cinema. We deeply appreciate their genuine commitment to promoting film culture and engaging audiences. I am excited to bring Romanian films and young, promising filmmakers to our cross-border region together. Their experience and insights into the extensive European Capital of Culture project are invaluable, and we are keen to learn how they have continued their initiatives post-title and what best practices they have developed."

— Mateja Zorn, Director of the Tribute to a Vision Cross-Border Film Festival

 

Ceau, Cinema! and the cinemas in Timisoara

For eight editions, until 2022, Ceau, Cinema!, a festival dedicated to European cinema, did not have any cinema to hold its indoor screenings (the outdoor ones always took place in a former open-air cinema, the Summer Garden, in the city center).

The former network of art-house halls, built during communism, had collapsed, and this left Romania's cities, including Timisoara, almost without cinemas for art films (while the number of multiplexes has steadily increased - in Timisoara there are two, with multiple screens each).

The festival suffered because of this, all the more so as it also encountered difficulties in accessing local funding (due to a faulty system, which was remedied only with a new administration, starting with 2020-2021), in order to be able to rent projection and sound equipment at the highest standards.

In fact, one of the reasons for initiating the festival was precisely to sound the alarm about the disastrous situation of the cinematographic infrastructure and to ask for the modernization of the halls. So the festival went to theaters, courtyards and various other alternative spaces. And the community was with us.

With the aspirations to obtain the title of European Capital of Culture for the city, but also under pressure from local film associations and organizations, the former administration, using a national law that allowed it to do so, took possession of the buildings of eight former cinemas in the bankrupt national network (located both in the city center, as well as in different neighborhoods) and began an extensive process of modernization of five of them.

Four became or are to become multifunctional cultural centers, but mainly focused on film screenings, and the fifth, Studio Cinema, located in the historic center, is designed to operate exclusively as a cinema, with two halls and including a cinematheque and a small production studio. The new administration has also created a center under which a department that manages these spaces operates.

A first cinema, Victoria (almost 200 seats), in a neighborhood close to the center, was reopened in 2022, and at the ninth edition, which took place in July of that year, Ceau, Cinema! was able to organize screenings there for the first time. It was an important and emotional moment.

At the anniversary edition, the tenth, in 2023, which also coincided with the year in which Timisoara was European Capital of Culture, we used, again, Victoria Cinema, but not Timis Cinema (500-seat hall, reopened in the center), which was not ready until last autumn.

This year, we continued at Victoria Cinema and entered for the first time in the new version of Timis Cinema (where we had held a few screenings at the beginning of the festival, even before the cinema closed, due to the huge level of degradation). A new essential step has been taken.

In autumn, the reopening of the Studio Cinema is also scheduled, with its two projection rooms (one with almost 200 seats, and the other with about 70 seats) - the two associations that created Ceau, Cinema! - Marele Ecran (withdrawn from the festival in the meantime) and Pelicula Culturala, which would also participate in the organization of screenings, outside the festival.

Therefore, as far as Ceau, Cinema! is concerned, there were two major beneficial consequences of the fact that Timisoara held the honorable position of European Capital of Culture - the reopening of art-house cinemas and the creation of a predictable, transparent and professional financing system (for which the organizing associations have constantly pleaded).

Of course, this also came with new challenges for the festival. Once the films in the distribution finally have a place to be seen in Timisoara (i.e. in the usual program of the new cinemas), Ceau, Cinema! began to focus its attention in several other directions.

First of all, bolder or more fragile European films, which do not reach the portfolio of local distributors and often not even in the program of other festivals in the country. Then, heritage films (made by both famous filmmakers and lesser-known directors), presented in restored versions, but also films for young audiences. Also, workshops and meetings with people in the film industry. In addition, several screenings outside the festival, throughout the year, as part of a film club. The new mission: to increase the cinephile audience and to develop and diversify the film culture.

 

More about the festival was written by Ionut Mares, film critic and artistic director of the festival.