The Romanian Cultural Institute brings this December some of the year's notable Romanian cinema to New York City in the Fifth Romaninan Film Festival. Romania has a very small film industry, but puts a very large footprint in the world of cinema.
Perhaps no nation has more Cannes prizes per capita, or a better streak at that festival, where Romanian films have been one of the big stories of the past decade.
This year’s annual Romanian Film Festival, which runs all weekend at Tribeca Cinemas, shows that triumphs of movies like “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “12:08 East of Bucharest” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” were hardly anomalies. Called “A New Beginning,” the festival includes “Aurora,” the latest feature from Cristi Puiu (director of “Mr. Lazarescu”), and “Tuesday, After Christmas,” by Radu Muntean.
Mr. Puiu and Mr. Muntean (whose previous features were “The Paper Will Be Blue” and “Boogie”) are leading figures of the Romanian New Wave, and their new films visited Manhattan in this year’s New York Film Festival. So did “The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu,” , wich was named by the New Tork Times as “an extraordinary documentary by Andrei Ujica”. The film was assembled from archival footage, that revisits the life and reign of Romania’s long-serving Communist strongman, who died in the revolution of 1989.
The movies and the documentaries presented by the Romanian directors are tough and have an unsentimental aesthetic, but they are showing great range and variety.
”There remain many worlds to be discovered and stories to be told, even within the boundaries of a small country with a complicated history and a startling number of ambitious, cleareyed filmmakers”. (New York Times)
December 2010
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