The last few years have witnessed a series of excellent films coming from Romania. First to come was Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. This year Americans got to see Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest. Coming early next year will be 4 months, 3 weeks & 2 days, winner of the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2007, by Cristian Mungiu. Each of these films has received critical success, but only limited recognition by American filmgoers, perhaps because many have an aversion to subtitles. Each film reflects a bit of the new found freedom of Romania emerging from Communist rule, whether they are set in or after the Communist period.

The Palme d’Or for 4 months, 3 weeks & 2 days is an important recognition of work that is coming out of Romania. In reflecting on winning the prize, Mungiu said:

It was very much perceived not as my award, but as a recognition for the Romanian cinema and for Romanian culture in general. To be honest I never thought it would be so popular, but people reacted like in football. They shouted and screamed and got in the streets and called.

Any time anybody gets an award in cinema it’s very technical, but we started getting lots and lots of press during the festival. The awards ceremony was transmitted live on the national television, so everybody was aware.

As soon as I got back home I got the medal from the president—the highest cultural medal of the country—and the key to my home town. (It’s not usable, but you know.) It was very strange for me, because I got all these things from people who haven’t seen the film. It’s more about the award and about the pride of getting such an award.

I can see why. It’s a rare opportunity for somebody coming from a smaller country, a smaller culture, to see good news about Romania in the front page of the paper.

The three films that have garnered attention for the emerging Romanian film industry all have a similar style that has a strong connection with realism. Each film gives us a taste of what life is or was like in Romania, but also, because of the realism, allows other viewers to recognize their own stories. Mungiu spoke of this sense of reality in speaking of his interest in filmmaking:

I got, first of all, my desire for films from not liking the films that I was seeing, and not from admiring something. This was in the ’80s and early ’90s. I was watching a lot of local stuff and a lot of Romanian films with people who apparently looked like us and talked like us, but they looked like aliens to us, because nothing like that ever happened in real life and everything was so fake—mostly for propagandistic reasons, but not necessarily—because of the way of filmmaking. So we developed somehow mirroring this way of filmmaking, and that is why mostly all of us have this sympathy for realism and for telling about the real things that happen in a very realistic or naturalistic way.

This is why I say I’m taking my creation from life, because the thing that I have to check all the time when I write is if this is believable and if it could happen in real life. And if I think it’s not, it’s from me and spectacular. Then I would just drop it. All the effort of writing and rewriting the screenplay was not to add things, but to drop things. I was trying to identify all the time things that came from me or the need to give information as the writer or to comment, and finally I hope I took everything out.

When asked about the sudden surge in good films coming from Romania, Mungiu said:

We don’t have a very good explanation. Nobody knows why this is happening there and now. But I suppose it’s connected to the way we work. We’re not only writer-directors, but also producers. Everybody produces their own piece, so there is no kind of intrusion from somebody else in the decisions that I make and everything is done for the benefit of the film. We don’t live off filmmaking. There is no economic pressure on us, because it’s impossible from the beginning to get any money back. So we just take money as a form of investing in us. And then I think it’s a generation of people that have something to say and have learned how to tell it.

Mungiu’s film, 4 months, 3 weeks & 2 days, will officially open in late January (New York) and early February (Los Angeles) and then roll out to other markets. There is a one week award-qualifying run in Los Angeles in December.