Pavle Levi’s insightful and well-argued book, Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema examines the evolution of the national Yugoslav and regional post-Yugoslav cinema within its shifting political and cultural landscape – initially, in the context of individual expression under the repressive government of Josip Broz Tito, then subsequently, as […]
Tag: Romanian Cinema
Don’t Lean Out the Window, 1994
A thematic structure that continues to surface in several of the post 1989 Revolution films during the Shining Through a Long, Dark Night: Romanian Cinema, Then and Now series is the use of an intertwining, circular narrative as a metaphor for national self-reflection – and re-evaluation – in the aftermath of the Nicolae Ceauşescu regime […]
The Paper Will Be Blue, 2006
A droll and acerbic fictional corollary to Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution, Radu Muntean’s The Paper Will Be Blue, like Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is an odyssey through the crumbling institutions and broken social systems of a country […]
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 2007
Coincidentally, like Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light, Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a film that is also characterized by the element of subverted expectation, but this time, to indelible and bracing effect. Set in Romania during the waning days of Soviet bloc communism under Nikolai Ceaucescu in the late 1980s where […]
Occident, 2002
Something of a cross between Julie Bertucelli’s Since Otar Left and Bohdan Slama’s Something Like Happiness in its wry and affectionate portrait of Eastern European diaspora after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cristian Mungiu’s refined and ingeniously constructed first feature film, Occident also evokes the spirit of Krzysztof Kieslowski in its bittersweet, delicately interconnected […]
Maria, 2003
Channeling the spirit of Italian neorealism in its bleak and unrelenting portrait of abject poverty, Peter Calin Netzer’s Maria is a provocative and articulate social interrogation on the role of globalization, international charity, and the media on the socioeconomic polarization of the working class. Based on a true story (an sad truth that is reinforced […]