Revolutions in Romanian Cinema

11/3/07 to 12/9/07

A recent spate of prizewinning films reveals the Romanian film scene as one to watch. “These films share the eye of the historian and the gaze of the auteur as they consider a people emerging from a past defined by foreign power-games and local hardship. Their stories are different, but they display an immediacy and an energy in common.”-Time Out

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The Paper Will Be Blue, December 2

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Past Films

The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu
- Sunday, December 9 4:30 PM
Cristi 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.”-N.Y. Times
The Paper Will Be Blue
- Sunday, December 2 5:15 PM
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.
12:08 East of Bucharest
- Sunday, December 2 7:05 PM
A provincial TV talk show turns into a battle over the history of the Romanian revolution in Corneliu Porumboiu's hilarious allegory. With short Humanitarian Aid.
The Great Communist Bank Robbery
- Sunday, November 25 3:00 PM
“Alexandru Solomon's film is both a bizarre recreation of a crime of which the motive is still difficult to fathom and an astonishing evocation of a lost world of Romanian Stalinism.”-BBC. With short Tertium non datur.
Children of the Revolution: Recent Romanian Shorts
- Sunday, November 25 5:15 PM
Short films by some of Romania's leading directors-Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, and Cătălin Mitulescu, among others-reveal generations in transition.
Occident
- Saturday, November 17 6:00 PM
The debut film by Cristian Mungiu is a comic triptych of life in the New Romania.
The Way I Spent the End of the World
- Sunday, November 4 4:30 PM
Please see Saturday, November 3.
The Way I Spent the End of the World
- Saturday, November 3 6:00 PM
Romania's entry for this year's Oscars is a surprisingly warmhearted coming-of-age story set during the final months of Ceauşescu's rule. With a radiant performance by Dorotheea Petre, Best Actress winner at Cannes. Repeated on Sunday, November 4.
California Dreamin' (Endless)
- Saturday, November 3 8:10 PM
An American military convoy is stranded in a small Romanian town in Cristian Nemescu's sharp comedy of corruption and international miscommunication.

Revolutions in Romanian Cinema

11/3/07 to 12/9/07

Ask even hardened cinephiles to name the country that's won the most major prizes at the Cannes film festival in the past three years, and they'll probably come up with some of the usual suspects: France, Japan, Italy, maybe Korea. The true answer, however, is Romania, which is especially surprising considering it produces only six movies a year (the fewest in Europe). It's not surprising at all, however, to those who have seen films like The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu (Un Certain Regard, 2005), 12:08 East of Bucharest (Caméra d'Or, 2006), or this year's winners, California Dreamin' (Un Certain Regard) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cannes's top prize, the Palme d'Or). Hollywood could learn a thing or two from these models of narrative focus and invention; they create memorably idiosyncratic characters and incidents while following specific events as they unfold, usually disastrously, often comically. (As 4 Months director Cristian Mungiu notes, “Life's misfortunes can look very funny. Provided they happen to other people.”) Their stories and settings, though, are thoroughly Romanian, and offer a glimpse into a society that's gone through all the promises, disasters, and turmoils of dictatorship, revolution, and post-Communist reality. It's a new breed of filmmaking, at once fast-paced and cerebral, stylized and realistic, witty and suspenseful.

PFA is proud to present nearly all of these award-winning films (while we await a local release of 4 Months, we offer a chance to see the director's very rare first film, Occident), as well as other selections from, to quote Ali Jaafar in Variety, “the emerging powerhouse in world cinema.”

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Series organized with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute, New York. Special thanks to Oana Radu, RCINY; Alina Salcudeanu, Romanian National Center for Cinema (CNC); Ilinca Ilie, Romanian Embassy, Washington, DC; and Peggy Parsons, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, for their invaluable assistance.