Bucharest International Film Festival
The Bucharest International Film Festival, which was in its 21st edition this year, is the capital city’s only feature film competition.
Corina Sabău, 11.10.2025, 14:00
The Grand Prize of the 2025 edition of the Bucharest International Film Festival was awarded to the production The President’s Cake, directed by Hasan Hadi. The film also won Tudor Panduru the cinematography award. The award for Best Screenplay went to the film One for the Road a film co-written and directed by Francesco Sossai. The Bucharest International Film Festival, which was in its 21st edition this year, is the capital city’s only feature film competition, and brings together new productions, award winners at major festivals around the world, Romanian productions, as well as special events. The festival opened with the screening of the film Baby Teeth directed by Mihai Mincan, a film first shown internationally at the Venice International Film Festival. Opening the festival with a Romanian title has already become a tradition, with the 2024 edition being opened by the multi-award-winning New Year That Never Came, directed by Bogdan Mureșanu.
The 21st edition featured two retrospectives, one dedicated to the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, and the second to the Israeli director Nadav Lapid. Both events enjoyed the presence of the two directors, as special guests of the Bucharest International Film Festival. Dana Dimitriu, the initiator and director of the festival, told us more about the two retrospectives, beginning with that dedicated to Nadav Lapid:
“His most famous films are Ahed’s Knee, Synonyms, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, and Yes, his most recent work, which was presented this year at Cannes and recently opened in Paris. Nadav Lapid, one of the most famous Israeli directors, is based in Paris and is a very active militant against the Netanyahu regime and the war in Gaza. He speaks about this situation both in his films and in his public statements. They are extraordinary films and some of them don’t make it into the cinema networks, which is why the festival provides a unique opportunity to watch them, and in the presence of the director. The second retrospective was dedicated to Sergei Loznitsa, who came to Bucharest with his documentary films State Funeral and Babi Yar, but also with his most recent short film, Paleontology Lesson, which was shown for the first time internationally in Bucharest. At the Q&A with the public, Loznitsa spoke about working on these films and the process of making a documentary film. The meeting was extraordinary and I am glad that this remarkable director was introduced to the festival public. For those not familiar with Sergei Loznitsa, he is a graduate of the Moscow Film School before later moving to Germany, and the author of remarkable films that pay a kind of homage to Ukraine, criticize Russian propaganda and show the horrors of war. These are films that I would recommend to everyone, films that should be seen by everyone.”
The latest edition of the Bucharest International Film Festival also featured two new titles in the Romanian directors section: Andrei Ștefan Răuțu’s Night Butterflies and Claudiu Mitcu’s Rusalka. The director of the festival Dana Dimitriu tells us more:
“I’d heard about Andrei Ștefan Răuțu’s film and wanted to see it. I found it very interesting that he made a film about a singer I like very much, Marina Voica. Not many young people probably know who she is, but I really liked the warmth of this film and the way in which Andrei Ștefan Răuțu speaks about the Romanian pop music of the 1980s, which I believe is a chapter we should know about. Marina Voica was herself invited to attend the screening and that made it a very special evening. Rusalka is another film I liked, and I like Claudiu Mitcu’s films and projects in general. We wanted to have this film too because it is a great challenge to promote Romanian cinema. And we, at the festival, don’t just promote the latest Romanian productions and the classics, we stage screenings of all kinds of films, because as we know, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to promote films due to financial problems”
Bucharest International Film Festival featured also had an event dedicated to one of the most important theatre and cinema actors in Romania, Grigore Vasiliu Birlic. The Media Hall of the Romanian Peasant Museum hosted the screening of the film Telegrams, starring Birlic, which was shown at the prestigious Cannes International Film Festival in 1960. The film was directed by Gheorghe Naghi, based on the short stories of I.L. Caragiale and shows Birlic in one of his most exquisite roles. The screening was organised in partnership with the Grigore Vasiliu Birlic Cultural Association.
