Thirty years after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, this series samples the best in Romanian cinema from the last three decades.
Read full descriptionTwo young women go underground to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in this gripping, prizewinning drama. “Beautifully realistic, faultlessly made” (Los Angeles Times).
A hopeful young entrepreneur decides to raise money by delivering an unknown package in this deadpan road movie, inspired by Jarmusch’s Down by Law. The debut film by the director of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.
Puiu’s saga of the last hours in the life of a cranky Bucharest widower is “both sad and darkly funny . . . sharply conceived and richly populated” (Chicago Reader). “A thorny masterpiece” (New York Times).
A provincial TV talk show turns into a battle over the history of the Romanian revolution in Porumboiu’s hilarious allegory, winner of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes.
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A strong-willed Bucharest schoolteacher finds herself adrift and assaulted in Pintilie’s blisteringly apocalyptic farce of the last days of Ceauşescu’s rule, fueled by an “imaginative hysteria that rattles with sustained fury” (J. Hoberman).
A hospital nurse speaks out against the corruption of the secret police—and pays the price—in this uncompromising examination of immorality, revolution, and social conviction. “One of the most powerful accounts of the Romanian Revolution” (Film Society of Lincoln Center).
A clueless tank crew wanders Bucharest’s chaotic streets on the night that Ceauşescu falls in Radu Muntean’s wry, humanist portrait of historic times.
Grand prize winner at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival, this “ferocious psychological drama with the pace of a thriller” (Los Angeles Times) follows an upper-class Bucharest architect who’ll stop at nothing to keep her grown son out of jail.
The infamous televised speech Nicolae Ceauşescu delivered on the night his regime fell in 1989 is the centerpiece of this sophisticated investigation of the power of images.
Ujică’s Russian-made precursor to The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu uses found footage to revisit the tale of a Soviet cosmonaut whose time in space corresponded with the sudden downfall of the Soviet Union.
A portrait of a nation—and a cult of personality—through found footage, Ujică’s dissection of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s media masquerade is “a cinematic tour de force” (New York Times).
Two men form an unlikely couple in one of Bucharest’s toughest Romany neighborhoods in this naturalist drama, a gay, Romany Romeo and Juliet.
Radu Jude dissects the rise of neofascism and the reemergence of anti-Semitism in Europe in this metafictional black comedy. “A complicated meditation on the responsibilities—and limits—of art in the face of horror” (New York Times).