Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu • 2006 • Romania
Starring Mircea Andreescu, Teodor Corban, Ion Sapdaru
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?
Up Next in Romanian New Wave
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Aurora
Directed by Cristi Puiu • 2010 • Romania
Starring Cristi Puiu, Clara Vodǎ, Valeria SeciuDirector Cristi Puiu’s follow-up to his Romanian New Wave landmark THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU is a mesmerizingly tense, daringly minimalist crime thriller infused with a creeping existential dread. The direc...
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The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
Directed by Cristi Puiu • 2005 • Romania
Starring Ion Fiscuteanu, Luminița Gheorghiu, Doru AnaHailed as one of the defining works of twenty-first-century cinema thus far, Cristi Puiu’s unflinching, darkly comic bureaucratic nightmare heralded the arrival of the Romanian New Wave as a major cine...
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Sieranevada
Directed by Cristi Puiu • 2016 • Romania
Starring Mimi Brǎnescu, Judith State, Bogdan DumitracheRomanian New Wave leader Cristi Puiu continues to blend the personal and the political to arresting effect in this sprawling, drolly comic family portrait that doubles as an existential X-ray of cont...
