April 11 – May 2
Better late to the party than never. New Romanian Cinema has been the “buzz” of the international film scene for the past two years, as its young directors gathered all the major prizes at Cannes, and became the subject of countless articles marveling at the emergence of this “new wave” from unlikely origins. Our survey of this exciting development encompasses many genres and subjects, but is distinguished by a remarkable cohesion of tone and insight. No one interested in contemporary cinema can afford to miss it.
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Denying that there is any Romanian cinema to speak of, as Peter Greenaway did in 2005, or that its recent, seemingly miraculous outpouring of critically acclaimed films in no way constitutes a movement - Cristi Puiu jokes that it's just a clutch of “desperate directors” - now seems untenable, even if one cautions that the film world loves nothing so much as a “new wave,” intent sometimes on premature celebration, on imputing intent to coincidence, design to historical happenstance. More dangerous, perhaps, is to suggest that the new Romanian cinema emerged ex nihilo, thereby replicating the very historical amnesia which so many of its films address. There was a Romanian cinema, even under Ceausescu, and the master Lucian Pintilie (unfortunately little known in North America), though expatriated in France for much of his career, must be considered a prime influence and antecedent for the new generation. (We have included two of his key works to illustrate that influence, though he deserves a full-scale retrospective; we leave Nae Caranfil, a younger, important transitional figure, for another time.) Similarly, wondering at the unlikely origin of this phenomenon can shade into condescension. Romania, after all, gave the world countless great artists and thinkers in the twentieth century - Ionesco, Cioran, Eliade, Brâncusi, Celibidache, Urmuz to name but a few - even if most of them left or fled their home country.
Some of these, Ionesco and Urmuz in particular, provide the cultural heritage and perhaps account for the predominant tone of recent Romanian cinema: a fin du monde absurdity, from the apocalyptic
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