Occident
“A Romanian comedy?” I heard someone asking in disbelief after the film was over. And truly, the main memories evoked by the words “Romanian New Wave” are usually tedious long shots of aborted babies and people walking. It is no wonder then that it is hard to believe that one of the founding films of the new wave, Cristian Mungiu’s 2001 hit OCCIDENT, is a hearty comedy.
The Paper Will Be Blue (Hârtia va fi albastră)
This 2006 film by Radu Muntean focuses on the night of between the 22nd and the 23rd of December 1989, when in Bucharest the Revolution was in full swing. Steve Williams reviews.
Stuff and Dough (Marfa Si Banii)
Opportunity and opportunism form the central themes in Christi Puiu’s tense, simple Romanian road movie. Ovidiu (Alexandra Papadopol) plays the young man who undergoes the transformative odyssey, delivering some “medical supplies” for a local gangster in his home town, to an address in Bucharest.
The Oak (Balanţa)
Romanian master Lucian Pintilie constructs a “Theatre of the Absurd” darker and more acerbic than any from Eugene Ionesco’s imagination.
