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4 months, 3 weeks & 2 days is a film that involves abortion, but is not really about abortion. The process of getting an illegal abortion in Communist Romania is the driving action in the film, but the film really centers on relationship and on the corruption of the system. For director Cristian Mungiu, however, the entire issue of abortion’s illegality during the Communist period of Romania is central to how the film came to be. He didn’t make the film to talk about abortion per se, but about the people it affected.

I felt it’s good to make a film for my generation of people before I get too old and forget things. I belong to a very special generation. I’m born in 1968. This makes me one of the so called “Children of the Decree,” which is children that came into the world because of this law that outlawed abortion in 1966. So later on, traveling a lot in festivals with my first film, I got to meet lots of people my age who emigrated, and I understood that they would like to see a film about themselves at some point. And last year I happened to run into this girl again, the one who told me this story before, and I was struck by the emotional potential that this story still was having for me.

Because of having abortion illegal in Romania since 1966 to 1989, we had nearly half a million women that died as a direct cause of illegal abortions. Then one of the first measures that the new Romanian government took in 1990 was to free abortions again in Romania—one of the first decisions in the new free world in the country—and the consequence was that we had nearly 1,000,000 abortions the first year, because people didn’t have any education about other ways about having children. So for me, it was a way of speaking about how not having this freedom for such a long while and how having this freedom without knowledge at the beginning very much led the same direction.

When asked about the experience of being a “child of the decree,” he said:

Honestly, this is something all of us got quite early from our parents. It’s not that we weren’t loved or cared about. It just happened. It just happened. This is the thing for most of us, because it wasn’t necessarily a period in which parents wanted to have more than one child. Starting in 1966 abortions were legal only after the age of 45 or after having four children. And mothers that were having ten children got this distinction of “mother-heroine” and some money from the state. So it was kind of a complicated period.

We had so many women dying because they wouldn’t allow the doctors to perform or to finish what the others started unless they would say who helped them, and most of them refused to say this because it was somebody very close to them.

I decided to make a film about this because no matter what the situation was, because we were so preoccupied with fighting back the system and to fight for what we felt was an intrusion in our personal lives, because of this we never noticed there was a very moral and ethical aspect connected to this decision. This is the most important answer you need to have, and it’s not a fight between you and the system (apart from that context) and it shouldn’t be something like this today.