Mungiu’s “Beyond the Hills” film to compete for awards at New York Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival this autumn

In only a week, Cristian Mungiu’s “Beyond the Hills” film was nominated to two of the most important film festivals taking place this autumn: New York Film Festival, which will take place between September 28 and October 14 and the Toronto Film Festival, from September 6 to 16.

According to Hollywood Report magazine, Cristian Mungiu is considered one of the top names announced for the line-up of the New York Film Festival, while for Toronto’s Film Festival the Romanian director is included in the “Masters Sidebar” alongside names such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Michael Winterbottom, Michael Haneke and Abbas Kiarostami.

New York Film Festival lineup

The 50th New York Film Festival, presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, will present 32 films in its main slate, representing the work of an international array of filmmakers ranging from Olivier Assayas to Robert Zemeckis. The festival will include four world premieres: Alan Berliner’s First Cousin Once Removed, a documentary about how Alzheimer’s disease affected poet and critic Edwin Honig, from HBO Documentary Films; Ang Lee’s 3D fantasy film Life of Pi, the opening night film; David Chase’s feature directorial debut, Not Fade Away, which will be featured as the centerpiece gala; and Robert Zemeckis’ drama Flight, starring Denzel Washington, which will serve as the closing night film.

The line-up includes a number of awards winners from the festival circuit: Michael Haneke’s Amour, which won the Palm d’Or at this year Cannes Film Festival; Cristian Mungui’s Beyond the Hills, starring Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Straten, who shared the best actress prize at Cannes, where Mungiu also took home the screenplay award; and Christian Petzold’s Cold War thriller Barbara, which won the Silver Bear for best director at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.

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Toronto Film Festival listings

For Toronto Film Festival, “Winterbottom’s Everyday”, which was filmed over five years, will receive a world premiere, as will Serbian filmmaker Goran Paskaljevic’s “When Day Breaks”.

At Toronto Film Festival, the lineup consists of premieres for Cannes titles like “Bertolucci’s Me and You”, the Italian director’s first film since “The Dreamers”, Cristian Mungiu’s “Beyond the Hills”, a nuns-gone-mad drama, and 103 year-old Manoel de Oliveira’s “Gebo and the Shadow”.

Toronto has also booked 27 first and second feature titles for its Discovery sidebar, including world premieres for Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves, set in 1920s Spain, Ramaa Mosley’s The Brass Teapot, starring Juno Temple and Michael Angarano, Rola Nashef’s Detroit Unleashed, set in that city’s Arab-American community, and Dutch director Michiel ten Horn’s The Deflowering of Eva van End.

About “Beyond the Hills” movie

The Guardian’s review dubbed Mungiu’s film as “a brilliant, scary portrayal of irrationality and fear inEurope’s dark heart”, adding that Cristian Mungiu has given “a captivating tragi-comedy of sexual hysteria and material want. This long movie is played out in a kind of real time, a mysterious secular passion play; Mungiu apparently based the action on the reportage of the BBC World Service’s Bucharest bureau chief Tatiana Niculescu Bran who wrote about a case in 2005, where a novice died after being subjected to an exorcism in Romania’s Tanacu monastery: an irrational horror at the heart of 21st-century Europe.”

Production company: Mobra Films

Cast: Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur, Valeriu Andriuţă, Dana Tapalaga

Director: Cristian Mungiu

Producer: Cristian Mungiu

Executive producers: Pascal Caucheteux, Gregoire Sorlat, Vincent Maraval, Jean Labadie, Bobby Paunescu, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes

Director of photography: Oleg Mutu

Sales agent: Wild Bunch

Rating TBC, 150 minutes

Oana Vasiliu