After winning the top prize at Clermont-Ferrand in 2019 with his short The Christmas Gift (see the news), Romanian director Bogdan Mureşanu is currently at the picture-lock stage with his feature debut, Emergency Exit. The project is being staged by Mureşanu’s Kinotopia, with Chainsaw Europe and TVR (the Romanian national television station) serving as co-production companies.

The screenplay, written by the director, comprises six interconnected stories, one of them co-written with actress-screenwriter Iulia Lumânare. Interestingly, the feature recycles (and completes) The Christmas Gift and another, unreleased short film, New Year’s Eve. One of the protagonists is Ştefan Silvestru, the director of the national television station, who has to deal with a career-ending issue: an actress who appeared in a sketch to be broadcast on New Year’s Eve has defected the country. Silvestru’s son, Laurenţiu, who plans to defect by swimming across the Danube to Yugoslavia, is the protagonist of another story, all six of them exploring the atmosphere in Bucharest before the “end of the world”, or the fall of the regime.

The film’s budget amounts to circa €800,000, €170,000 of which come from the Romanian National Film Center. The MEDIA programme of Creative Europe also supported the project. The shoot ended in December 2022, with Boróka Biró and Tudor Platon serving as DoPs. Adrian Văncică, Nicoleta Hâncu, Emilia Dobrin, Andrei Miercure, Iulian Postelnicu, Mihai Călin and Ioana Flora play the most important parts.

We asked Mureşanu if there was any nostalgia imbued in his film, and he replied: “Far from it. Nostalgia involves a certain regret that those times are over, and there is not even one strand of that in my film’s DNA. I would say it is rather an event-driven movie, and by that, I mean that all the events happen over the course of one day, a day that equates to the end of the world. There is a musical track on the film's soundtrack composed and performed by the Celelalte cuvinte [lit. “The Other Words”] band, a track called “An End Is a New Beginning”. This title could sum up this story made up of several interconnected tableaux.

Emergency Exit will be released domestically next year.