Regizorii romani laudati peste ocean! Europe’s New Auteurs:Filmmakers With a Future By GARETH HARDING – The Wall Street Journal January 4, 2008

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A similar attitude is evident in the films of a group of Romanian directors with growing international reputations. “There is a Romanian wave breaking now,” says Claudia Landsberger, president of European Film Promotion, a trade association that markets European movies around the world. “This generation of filmmakers have so many stories to tell and they are capable of telling them in ways which resonate. They don’t make epic tearjerkers but fresh, tight and gripping films.”

Cristi Puiu was the first of the new bunch of Romanian directors to achieve international recognition with his film “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” the story of an old, sick man who is shuttled from hospital to hospital over the course of a night. Mr. Puiu’s second full-length feature, it picked up the prestigious Un Certain Regard trophy at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005 and a slew of other prizes in 2006.

Corneliu Porumboiu, a 32-year-old director from the eastern Romanian town of Vaslui, has also emerged as a darling of the international art-house circuit with his biting political satire, “12:08 East of Bucharest.” The film tells the story of a television station owner who stages a panel discussion on the toppling of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu 16 years after the actual events. Mr. Porumboiu’s first full-length feature, which becomes increasingly farcical as both panelists and viewers try to piece together what really happened in December 1989, is a savage critique of a “revolution” that merely replaced one communist despot with another Soviet-schooled apparatchik. The film won the Camera d’Or prize (for best first feature film) at Cannes in 2006.

Leonor Watling and Tim Robbins in Isabel Coixet’s ‘The Secret Life of Words.’

A year later another Romanian, Cristian Mungiu, won the the Palme d’Or — the top prize at Cannes — for his second feature “4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.” The hard-hitting drama also picked up the Film of the Year and Best Director awards at the European Film Awards in Berlin later in 2007.

The title of the film refers to the exact length of time scatterbrained student Gabita has been pregnant. With abortion illegal in communist Romania, she turns to her roommate for help. The backstreet abortionist they hire is as cruel and crooked as the system he works under and the two girls soon find themselves trapped in a web of lies and deceit as they struggle to muster the money to pay for the abortion.

Like the films of British director Ken Loach or Belgium’s Dardenne brothers, “4 Months…” is austere and uncompromising. There is no music, little in the way of fancy camera work and minimal editing. The takes are long and the backdrop — Bucharest housing estates in winter — is grim. Set in the twilight years of Ceausescu’s rule, Mr. Mungiu’s movie paints a bleak picture of life in eastern Europe’s most repressive regime. But the boyish-looking director denies its aim was political.

“I never wanted to make a ‘Good Bye Lenin!’ type of movie,” he says, referring to the slick, German box-office hit from 2003 about a son’s attempts to create a communist cocoon for his mother after she wakes up from a coma in post-Berlin Wall East Germany.

Still, Mr. Mungiu says enough time has passed since the end of the Soviet era that Eastern European directors have been able to revisit those events with a sense of artistic perspective. “We got to an age when we remembered stories from our 20s, which were the last days of communism,” Mr. Mungiu says. “You need some distance to tell stories about what happened to you when you were young.”
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