“When filming, you put what interests you in the centre, not on the margin.” So says a doctor surveying the endoscopy DVD of a deathly serious director whose alleged illness is nought more than one part of a ploy to rehearse in-depth and out of clothes with an attractive actress…
In Lvova and Taramaev’s Winter Journey (2013), parallel stories become one as two seemingly opposite men are brought together by a chance meeting and its consequential events. Eric (Aleksey Frandetti) is an opera singer preparing for the most important audition of his life. Lyoha (Evgeniy Tkachuk) is a petty criminal and vagabond with no one and nothing in his life. The…
I heavily dislike it when a film with so much promise on paper, ends up being a bit of a let down in the end. Romania has a complex history and an even more complicated recovery with democracy after the fall of Ceausescu. Roxanne is inspired by real events in debut director Hotea’s life and the lives of modern day Romanians…
In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin passed a bill prohibiting the “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations to minors.” Under this law, LGBT youth are considered evil, sick, and an abomination. They face constant homophobic slurs and intimidation that is entrenched and licensed in modern Russian society. Elena Klimova, a Russian journalist, started the…
“10 years before the collapse of communism” proclaims the opening title card of Viktoria, and by the time we reach the closing credits we seem to have lived it. Bulgarian filmmaker Maya Vitkova’s debut feature is a writer-director-producer picture if ever there was one, an over-extended mess of a movie that could stand to have its luvvies cut to ribbons. Like the…
Porumboiu is, without the shadow of a doubt, my favourite representative of Romania’s celebrated New Wave. His brilliant 12:08 East Of Bucharest (2006), a tremendously sharp but unassuming dry comedy in which a local television host invites a guest line-up to look back at the events of the 1989 Romanian revolution, is perhaps my pick of the bunch. That film’s whole set-up is something of a satirical farce, the show’s guests bicker incessantly about minor details that may or may not even be relevant. In The Second Game, Porumboiu substitutes the depiction of a fictional experiment on memory with a real-time recording of a similar endeavour in which the director participates alongside his father.
The great Polish helmer Krzysztof Zanussi’s films of the ‘60s and ‘70s cast a shadow over Quod Erat Demonstrandum, a film whose black and white agéd aesthetic contributes a sense of antiquity that might have made it a contemporary of movies like Camouflage and The Illumination. It is, like those films, a socio-political tract set against the background of academia, abstract…
I’m an Old Communist Hag is a populist delight that played like gangbusters to the local audience at TIFF Romania back in June. But the movie’s crowd-pleasing capacity oughtn’t to be mistaken for an indication of levity, and if it’s the quick-fire laughs that give it its fun, it’s the deeper issues they give way to that make it a film that lingers. As the adult daughter returned from…
In the summer of 2010 a great flood devastated Romania’s north-east. At least twenty-one people died and many were displaced from their homes. Tudor Cristian Jurgiu sets his debut feature The Japanese Dog in the aftermath of the floods. Costache (Victor Rebengiuc) is an elderly gentleman who lost his wife and his home in the devastation. He goes about his daily errands and tasks…
The inimitable Luminita Gheorghiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) is undeniably illuminating in Child’s Pose (2013), an emotionally entrenching effort of Romanian social realism. When her son is involved in an incident which leaves a child dead, Cornelia does whatever it takes to personally intervene and control the consequences of the dire circumstance. Willing to lie, bribe, and threaten those able to help her son’s situation, this bourgeoisie mother with a serious God-complex endeavors to appease her foreseen enemies—the cops, the witness, the family—in order to maintain the dysfunctional relationship she carries on with her son. Her son, recognizing her hypocrisy and efforts to control him his whole life, rejects her phony affection, seeing that it is herself that she wishes to serve, not her son, nor anyone else.