romanian new wave

Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship was overthrown in a violent revolution in December 1989, and by the mid-2000s a generation raised inside it had picked up cameras to film what the fifteen years of transition afterward actually looked like. Two shorts announced it in 2004: Cristi Puiu's Cigarettes and Coffee won the Short Film Golden Bear in Berlin, and Catalin Mitulescu's Trafic won the Short Film Palme d'Or in Cannes that same year. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu arrived in 2005 and set the register the films have kept since: long takes, no score, a camera that stays in the room while an ambulance carries a dying man from one Bucharest hospital to another all night and each of them sends him on. Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days puts the old regime directly on screen: a student arranges an illegal abortion for her roommate in Ceausescu's Romania, where both were punishable by death. Corneliu Porumboiu moves the same patience into the new one, giving a young policeman in Police, Adjective a marijuana case he thinks is not worth ruining a boy over, and a superior who tells him the law is the law regardless of the regime that wrote it. Almost nothing is dramatised, and the tension is in waiting to see who gives in.

Distinguish from Shares the long-take observational style of Slow Cinema but is more narrative and socially specific — these films are always about Romania, its institutions, and the afterlife of communism. The neorealist inheritance from Italian Neorealism is visible in the nonprofessional casting and location shooting, but the Romanian films are more formally rigorous and less sentimental.