12:08 East of Bucharest

Winner of the Caméra d’Or at Cannes for best first film, Corneliu Porumboiu’s debut feature is a dryly comic exploration of the often slippery relationship between history, truth, and memory. On the anniversary of the overthrow of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, the small city of Vaslui marks the occasion with a television talk show examining the town’s role in the 1989 revolution. As a handful of eyewitnesses attempt to reconstruct what really happened that day, their testimonies begin to unravel—raising the quietly devastating question: did the revolution ever come to Vaslui at all?

Starring Mircea Andreescu, Teodor Corban, Ion Sapdaru