Romania mania

>> The Romanian Film Festival presents a
host of award-winning films from
cinema’s newest New Wave

by MALCOLM FRASER

When Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days swept up the Palme d’Or and other prizes at this year’s Cannes festival, it was the culmination of a recent spate of award-winning and critically acclaimed films coming out of Romania. The clever cinephiles at the Cinéma du Parc have jumped on this newest New Wave, programming a selection of the finest recent Romanian films for the Romanian Film Festival in Montreal. The all-contemporary program spans across genres and offers work from both established veterans and newcomers.

A few of the films address the internationally known Romanian revolution of 1989 (you may recall the charming snuff footage of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife being executed on TV). In Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest, which picked up the Camera d’Or at Cannes last year, a TV host tries to organize a show to mark the 16th anniversary of the revolution. He can only manage to round up two unlikely guests, and finds to his dismay that both they and the viewers calling in to the show have widely divergent memories of the revolution, as well as personal bones to pick.

Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue takes place during the revolution itself; wartime action gets infused with ironic humour as an army lieutenant attempts to navigate the various feuding groups in the early days of the post-overthrow period. Sergiu Nicolaescu’s Fifteen is both a love story set during the revolution, and a portrait of the fateful hook-up’s love child 15 years later.

Other films go further back into Romania’s history. Radu Gabrea, a veteran Romanian director working since the 1960s, presents his newest drama, The Beheaded Rooster, a coming-of-age tale set in 1944, when the Romanian government broke ties with its ally, Nazi Germany. Cristian Nemescu’s California Dreamin’, winner of the Un Certain Regard award at this year’s Cannes, takes place during the Yugoslavian war; an American soldier transporting NATO equipment on a train gets entangled in local drama when the train stops in a Romanian village. Nae Caranfil’s The Rest Is Silence, set in 1911, is the story of a teenage actor who takes on the ambition to make a film about the 1877 Romanian war of independence.

But there’s more to Romanian film than heavy historical dramas. Tudor Giurgiu’s Love Sick is a contemporary coming-of-age romance between two teenage girls. Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a dark comedy set in a hospital, which won the A Certain Regard in 2005. The wonderfully titled Every Day God Kisses Us on the Mouth concerns a hitman recently released from jail and the ensuing havoc in his family.

Mircea Daneliuc’s The Nervous System tells the tale of an aging grandmother who visits her daughter’s unusual household with a hidden agenda. Another veteran director, Nicolae Margineanu (also an actor known for sinister roles in Hollywood action flicks), will be at the fest in person to present his spanking new film, Fiancées of America, a drama about a woman returning to Romania 16 years after defecting to the U.S.

That’s only a small sampling of the offerings, which also include a number of documentaries and short films. If the Cannes track record of the last few years is any indication, curious film fans would do well to check out what’s coming out of this heretofore obscure cinematic community.

The Romanian film festival runs from
nov. 2–8 at the Cinéma du Parc. See
Repertory listings for showtimes.

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