The festival will have a two-day avant-premiere in Iași and will run full speed in Bucharest afterwards, with The Sisters Brothers screened in the presence of its director Jacques Audiard on the opening day.

The Sisters Brothers is a coproduction between Why Not Productions (France), Les Films du Fleuve (Belgium), Mobra Films (Romania) and Menakoz Films (Spain), and it was shot almost entirely in Romania in 2017. The Romanian coproducers are Cristian Mungiu and Tudor Reu.

On 19 April 2019 The Sisters Brothers will be released on 45 screens in 26 Romanian towns by Voodoo Films.

The Italian-American director Roberto Minervini is also a guest of this year’s edition.

The festival will host the first edition of a script development workshop (10-17 April 2019) organised in tandem with HBO Europe. It will be attended by the finalists of the contest Write a Screenplay for Sebastian Stan: Florin Lăzărescu, Gabriel Molnar, Filip-Iosif Columbeanu, Alexandru Molico, Vlad Ghinea and Andrei Boeru. Their outlines for feature films or mini-series were chosen from among more than 200 scriptwriters’ outlines.

On 18 April 2019 Sebastian Stan will announce the two winning projects. The Romanian-born American actor will get involved in the development process of these scripts. The winners will receive 1,000 EUR each and support through the script development in order to have the scripts ready by 1 October 2019. Asociația Cinemascop will help them find a producer.

The workshop includes one-to-one sessions with scriptwriter Alexandru Baciu and conferences open for all the applicants and held by Romanian and HBO Europe film professionals.

The American Independent Film Festival is organised by Asociația Cinemascop with the support of the Romanian Ministry of Culture and National Identity and the Romanian Film Centre (cnc.gov.ro).