Romania

Cinema of Romania

In November 1948, after Romania fell under the Soviet Bloc, the film industry was nationalized and thus began the period of Socialist cinema, where films spoke to political ideology and reinforced stereotypes of what the working class should strive to become for a better nation.

In 1957, Romanian director, Ion Popescu-Gopo won the Palm D’or for best short film at the Cannes Film Festival for an animation called “Short History.”  Romania has produced some fabulous animations since and now the Romanian film Academy Awards, established in 2007, are called the Gopo awards, in honor of Ion Popescu-Gopo.

Many films from Romania in the 1960s and 70s depict tales of great historical glory, such as “Forest of the Hanged” and “Michael the Brave.”  “Michael The Brave” director, Sergio Nicolesceu, later became one of the public figureheads of the 1989 Romanian Revolution, which led to the downfall and execution of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena on Christmas Day, 1989.

In later years, Nicolesceu expressed regret at his political activism because it distracted him from his creative endeavors.

Before and during the Communist years, cinema was funded and supported by the state, but after Ceausescu’s fall, cinema was among the first to go down with it.  It took years before the cinema of Romania flourished again. 

About the Romanian New Wave

The Romanian New Wave is described as being, not so much a collective movement, like the Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s, where the filmmakers of France came together with a common set of ideals to fight the studio system, but rather, it consists of many talented Romanian filmmakers making individual films on their own terms at the same time.  

The Romanian New Wave took off in the mid 2000s and some could say it is still continuing today. The commonality amongst Romanian New Wave films are the themes they tackled in post-Ceausescu Romania.  

For forty-two years prior to Ceausescu’s downfall, the filmmakers of Romania were confined to making films that served the goals of the Communist government.  Films had to promote the ideals of hard work, sacrifice and patriotism for the good of the State.  Anything considered anti-party was an act of defiance and proved dangerous for the filmmakers.

Many of the Romanian New Wave filmmakers came of age in the 1980s, Ceausescu’s final decade.  After Democracy was ushered in, it took the filmmakers of Romania over a decade to start producing quality films again, primarily because, the formerly state-run production companies had all gone bankrupt, and possibly because it took awhile to build up the courage to speak out again.

The Romanian New Wave films eventually came out in mass, starting with “Stuff and Dough” in 2001 (Cristi Puiu’s feature debut), though many critics credit Cristi Puiu’s 2005 black comedy hit, “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” as the true start of the Romanian New Wave as it was the film that put an international spotlight on Romanian cinema, winning the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

Following “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” Romanian films had massive international success with “12:08 East of Bucharest,” “How I Spent The End of the World,” and “4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” all of which won various distinctions at Cannes and other international festivals.