New Romanians.

"It's hard to pin down the exact source of the current wellspring of Romanian talent, but critics and filmmakers suggest aesthetic, political, and industrial shifts have all played a part." For indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman talks with key players in this "newest national film movement to catch fire" and points to KinoKultura's special issue on New Romanian Cinema for further exploration.

Beginning with editors Christina Stojanova and Dana Duma's introduction, a couple of observations can be made immediately. First, the French have been onto the Romanians for some time now, with special mentions going to attention paid in the last few years by Cahiers du cinéma and Positif, which itself devoted an issue in January to Romanian cinema. Second, it'd evidently be hard to underestimate the significance of Lucian Pintilie in the history of Romanian cinema, particularly his 1968 film, The Reconstruction. Writes Dominique Nasta in KinoKultura:

The violent, savage, supposedly irrational process intended to put an abrupt end to Ceausescu's reign was - as we all witnessed via not always reliable media mise en scènes - much more radical in Romania than in other countries from the Eastern bloc. The long-closed bottle containing the only real dissident film from the late 1960s was miraculously found and opened. The film had barely circulated, so that it looked brand new in 1990. Considering its revolutionary content and stylistic composition, critics and audiences alike developed a "Reconstruction year zero" syndrome, unanimously calling it the first real Romanian work of film art.

Back to Anthony Kaufman: "'In my opinion The Reconstruction is the best movie in the history of the Romanian cinema,' says [Corneliu] Porumboiu, who won Cannes' Camera d'Or for his feature debut [12:08 East of Bucharest] last year. 'I think this movie had a huge influence on my generation.'"

Posted by dwhudson at June 13, 2007 6:52 AM