Iulian Mihu (born 1926) has produced only seven films in twenty-five years; each of them has been considered a masterpiece in which a collective national experience is filtered through his unique artistic vision. The Pale Light of Sorrow recalls the “magical realists” of South American literature in its uncanny mixture of fantasy and reality. Based on the childhood memories of writer George Macovescu, it is set at the start of World War I in a small village near Buzau where the peasants are enslaved by oil drilling and, when war breaks out, by the occupying Germans. A teacher tries to organize them to protest their miserable conditions, but his mission becomes futile in the face of a typhus epidemic and the strains of war which further warp relationships. All of this is viewed through the eyes of the teacher's young son Ionica; we drift with him into a fantasy world of his own creation when the reality around him becomes too harsh.