04/08/2025 - The film, set in the near future, centres on a man who has the ability to control electricity

In a film industry where funding is always an issue, genre movies are quite a rarity. If the average Romanian feature favours urban and interior locations, newcomer director Dan Radu Mihai goes in the opposite direction with Monarch, a science fiction road movie shot in over 50 locations throughout the country. The film is being produced by Livia Rădulescu through Redwood Productions as well as by Armadillo Entertainment (Romania, via producers Paul-Răzvan Macovei and Tudor Hermeneanu) and Dash Film (Romania, via producers Dan Radu Mihai and Pătru Păunescu), and is being co-produced by 8Heads Productions (Czech Republic, via producer Julietta Sichel).

The screenplay, written by the director together with Dan Sociu, focuses on Bogdan (Vladimir Proca), a young man who can control electricity. In the near future, when society is hyperconnected and oversaturated with artificial stimuli, the protagonist goes on a quest to find the drugs able to help him control his condition. Along the way, he will meet strange characters, while technology becomes an increasingly destabilising presence.

The producers tell Cineuropa that the budget is still a work in progress, but the project received circa €160,000 from the Romanian National Film Center. The film was shot in June and July, with producer Pătru Păunescu also serving as DoP. Ada Lupu, András Buzási, Oana Popescu, Christine Cizmaș, Andi Vasluianu and Gheorghe Visu play supporting characters in this film, which is only the country’s second sci-fi flick in decades, after Alecs Năstoiu’s independent production The Secret of Pin-up Island, which passed almost unnoticed through Romanian cinemas last year.

We asked the director what methods he used to bring the future to the screen: “In the presentations we did during the funding stage, we consistently used the expression ‘unrealised present’ instead of ‘future’. It better described the world in which the film's story takes place and, to the same extent, provided a solid foundation for a story that has one foot in reality and the other in fantasy. As for the means, we used objects or experiences from today's world, such as the use of VR as a form of detention for those under house arrest, or gadgets for experiencing altered states of consciousness,” the director explains.

Producer Rădulescu tells Cineuropa: “Filming for Monarch took place in over 50 locations. We flew in a utility plane, got lost in a coniferous forest populated by giant satellite antennas, filmed on a train, then stopped it in the middle of nowhere, cycled through a field of wind turbines, and above all, we waited an entire year for the lavender to bloom and turn the deepest purple in mid-June. Despite the variety of locations and their unique characteristics, they came together quite easily, thanks to our collaborators, and the main challenge was travelling between them and, especially, creating a shooting schedule calculated right down to the minute, taking into account the distances and the 20 days we had available for the shoot.”

A domestic release for Monarch is tentatively set for autumn 2026.