Headphones on! 🎧 Today on BT Talks we explore the mindset of someone who has delivered 19 festival editions so far. Yes, we’re talking about TIFF — Transilvania International Film Festival 🎬 — where, alongside Andi Moisescu, our guest is Tudor Giurgiu.

From the very beginning, Tudor set out to build a festival in the spirit of Rotterdam or Berlin, and the fact that TIFF has been running for 19 years is compelling proof of the project’s staying power. “Year after year we’re ambitious and want to do new things. We want to surprise audiences and educate them,” he tells us.

Have a listen to our conversation with the man who put Romania on the global map of film festivals and helped raise standards across the events industry here at home.

The roles he plays in life

• When he’s not working on TIFF, Tudor is a director, screenwriter and film producer. Although each field calls for a different kind of personality, he says his crafts “intertwine in a bizarre way” and complete one another.

• “The director’s experience is the most complex and interesting, because you work with a lot of people. You have to get everyone in the same boat with you and rowing in the direction you want. It’s very hard to keep people motivated over a long period. You have to be an extraordinary psychologist to mobilize everyone the way you want.”

The ‘THINK BIG’ mindset and TIFF’s early editions

• For the first editions, Tudor worked with a festivals consultant from Warsaw. He helped them avoid organizational missteps and pay attention to how they handle artists, plan accommodation, set up juries, choose films and present promotional materials.

• TIFF didn’t come together overnight. “We spent a year and a half learning, writing and raising funds.”

• The team is essential to running a festival. “When I was younger, I found it harder to delegate. Now I delegate more easily. (...) I realized I can’t be a one‑man band, I’m not good at everything and I don’t think I should handle everything at the festival. I had the wisdom to bring in a film critic to take care of everything to do with film selection.”

• There’s also immediate gratification in making a festival happen. “You work for a year for 10 days and, when it comes together, you see joy in people’s eyes. (...) You look at people and if they find enough words of praise, that’s extraordinary.”

What’s next? 

• Because of the pandemic, Tudor is sceptical about the future of Romanian cinema. “I don’t have a good outlook on what’s going to happen here in the next few years. It’s an industry that depends on cinemas, audiences and the ticket we need to pay.” 

• We’re likely to face 2–4 tough years. 40% of every ticket goes back into production. That means fewer films will be made and it will get increasingly hard to secure financing for a project.

• Many American producers are moving to Croatia, Lithuania or the Czech Republic, where the state supports them through aid schemes or there are tax incentives that aren’t as effective in Romania.

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Editor: Popa Adelina, Banking intern, Banca Transilvania