Out of a national past fraught with invasions and battles, the Romanian cinema has crafted one of its most accomplished genres, the historical epic. A landmark among these is The Return of the Banished. Critic Manuela Cernat writes, “Cerebral and ambiguous, this almost Shakespearean biography of the sanguinary 16th century despot of Moldavia, Alexandru Lapusneanu...is in fact a subtle essay on power, on the drama of those chosen not just to live history but to make it, on the fate of a country at the mercy of its rulers.... The film enjoys a careful visual re-creation of the Moldavian Renaissance, while the richness of the script invests the characters with a noble, tragic dimension.”