30/10/2007

The Romanian Cinema Days in Italy kicked off last night with the screening of The Beheaded Rooster, the new film by Radu Gabrea (to be released in February in Romania, after its premiere at the Transylvania International Film Festival).

The event, promoted by the Associazione Itaro Arte (presided over by Veronica Lazar, the Romanian actress who has starred in films by Bernardo Bertolucci and Michelangelo Antonioni) with support from the Romanian National Film Centre, will bring to Rome (through tomorrow) and Pisa (from November 5-9) a number of acclaimed titles from the world’s top festivals.

At the centre of renewed interest, which places it among the most active industries in Europe, Romania today has a new generation of young filmmakers who learned from maestro Lucian Pintilie, and whose films are often characterised by cutting, caustic humour and ruthless sarcasm.

Proof of this lies in many of programmed films, from Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mister Lazarescu [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (a Dante-esque descent into the bowels of the health care system) to The Way I Spent the End of the World [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Catalin Mitulescu (set on the eve of the fall of Ceausescu), both awarded in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard.

There is no doubt that the Croisette deserves much of the credit for having turned the spotlight on the rebirth of Romanian cinema. The 2006 Camera d’Or to Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Corneliu Porumboiu
interview: Daniel Burlac
film profile], this year’s Palme d’Or to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Cristian Mungiu
interview: Oleg Mutu
film profile] by Cristian Mungiu, and the posthumous Un Certain Regard prize to California Dreamin’ [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Cristian Nemescu (who sadly passed away at a young age), have all convinced international distributors as well to seek out young directors from Bucharest and beyond.

These titles (along with other, lesser known but equal acclaimed internationally, such as The Paper Will Be Blue by Radu Muntean and Tudor Giurgiu’s Love Sick), are accompanied by a selection of documentaries and short films (including the latest by Pintilie, Tertium non datur, as well as Nemescu’s Marilena de la P7, Mitulescu’s Palme d’Or winner Trafic and the Golden Bear-winning Cigarettes and Coffee by Puiu).

(Translated from Italian)