Cristian Mungiu: Romanian cinema seizes the spotlight
Q&A
ARomanian film has won a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival in each of the last three years. In 2005, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," an almost real-time chronicle of an old-timer's descent into the chaotic Romanian healthcare system, won the top award in the festival's Un Certain Regard section. The following year, "12:08 East of Bucharest," a deadpan comedy in which the guests on a TV talk show look back at the 1989 overthrow of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, took home the Camera d'Or for best first film. And in May, Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," which details the process of obtaining a backroom abortion in the barter economy of '80s Bucharest, won the festival's biggest prize, the Palme d'Or.
With the film set to open Friday, the 39-year-old Mungiu spoke about the transformation of his country from totalitarian cultural wasteland to world-cinema hot spot.
Would you say there was a moment that kick-started the Romanian new wave?
It was probably in 2002, when my first film, "Occident," played at Cannes. That was the first Romanian film at the festival in some years and it was the first one by someone of a younger generation. I think it created a kind of positive competition and helped stimulate local filmmakers.
Is it accurate to think of this group of filmmakers as a movement?
We are perceived as a generation because we all belong to the same age group, between 30 and 40, and because we got international recognition around the same time. I think the most reasonable explanation for this new wave is that there's a generation of people who have lived more than half their lives now in the free world where they have many more choices than before. We don't share the same views on cinema necessarily, so it's difficult to say that we are a school or that we have an aesthetic manifesto.
But your movies do share stylistic elements: a concern for realism, a fondness for long takes.
I suppose there is a certain gift for realism and a reaction against the kind of cinema that was made in Romania in the '80s when we were students. The films back then were very fake and overacted and propagandistic. Because of that I think we developed a desire to make films that talk about life.
People call this the Romanian new wave. Was there a "first wave" and if so, when?
