Romania Magnified
Contemporary Romanian cinema is thriving. Popular comedies reflect a younger demographic of cultural consumption are breaking box-office records, while arthouse cinema retains its yearly visibility on the international film-festival circuits. In this regard, the retrospective offers a varied sample of the broad cinematic and thematic palette of Romanian cinema—from art-house experimentation in both narrative and documentary forms, to more audience-minded works that tap into established genres (comedy, film noir, coming-of-age, etc.).
Established auteur Radu Muntean expands his incisive psychological filmmaking within the genre tonalities of suspense in Intregalde, an artistic approach echoed by newcomer Mihai Mincan in his debut To the North, a theological thriller afloat in international waters. The variety of genre filmmaking is broadly exemplified by the two corrupt anti-hero state-employees of Bogdan Mirica’s urban noir Boss (a much-anticipated follow-up to his neo-western Dogs) and Paul Negoescu’s rural tragicomedy and festival-hit Men of Deeds, while Ana-Maria Comanescu’s debut Horia offers an opposing look at the sweet-natured innocence of its young protagonists’ coming-of-age road-trip.
A further outlier of genre cinema, Mammalia sees Sebastian Mihailescu explore patriarchy within a dystopic-goth art-house framework, while toxic masculinity and LGBTQIA+ identity is the focus of theater-director Eugen Jebeleanu’s Poppy Field, which dramatizes an infamous real-life case of homophobia and police-brutality that took place in Bucharest. Anca Damian’s The Island more than makes up for the sparse output of animated films in Romanian cinema, with the auteur delivering one of the most vibrant reimaginings of Romanian surrealist Gellu Naum’s titular work (itself inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), exploring topical themes of migration, consumerism and climate crisis under the musical direction of Alexander Balanescu and Ada Milea.
The documentaries included in the retrospective reflect a growing interest in the form’s engagement with archives (and by extension, a therapeutic process of (self)analysis)—an approach that is equally interested in personal stories (as in the case of director Eugen Buica’s moving family portrait of Mrs. Buica) and national histories (the epistolary essay Between Revolutions, co-written by director Vlad Petri and renowned writer Lavinia Braniste).
Contemporary Romanian cinema is thriving. Popular comedies reflect a younger demographic of cultural consumption are breaking box-office records, while arthouse cinema retains its yearly visibility on the international film-festival circuits. In this regard, the retrospective offers a varied sample of the broad cinematic and thematic palette of Romanian cinema—from art-house experimentation in both narrative and documentary forms, to more audience-minded works that tap into established genres (comedy, film noir, coming-of-age, etc.). Established auteur Radu Muntean expands his incisive psychological filmmaking within the genre tonalities of suspense in Intregalde, an artistic approach echoed by newcomer Mihai Mincan in his debut To the North, a theological thriller afloat in international waters. The variety of genre filmmaking is broadly exemplified by the two corrupt anti-hero state-employees of Bogdan Mirica’s urban noir Boss (a much-anticipated follow-up to his neo-western Dogs) and Paul Negoescu’s rural tragicomedy and festival-hit Men of Deeds, while Ana-Maria Comanescu’s debut Horia offers an opposing look at the sweet-natured innocence of its young protagonists’ coming-of-age road-trip. A further outlier of genre cinema, Mammalia sees Sebastian Mihailescu explore patriarchy within a dystopic-goth art-house framework, while toxic masculinity and LGBTQIA+ identity is the focus of theater-director Eugen Jebeleanu’s Poppy Field, which dramatizes an infamous real-life case of homophobia and police-brutality that took place in Bucharest. Anca Damian’s The Island more than makes up for the sparse output of animated films in Romanian cinema, with the auteur delivering one of the most vibrant reimaginings of Romanian surrealist Gellu Naum’s titular work (itself inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), exploring topical themes of migration, consumerism and climate crisis under the musical direction of Alexander Balanescu and Ada Milea. The documentaries included in the retrospective reflect a growing interest in the form’s engagement with archives (and by extension, a therapeutic process of (self)analysis)—an approach that is equally interested in personal stories (as in the case of director Eugen Buica’s moving family portrait of Mrs. Buica) and national histories (the epistolary essay Between Revolutions, co-written by director Vlad Petri and renowned writer Lavinia Braniste).