In the winter of 1992, in a small provincial town in Moldova, a young woman named Ema wanders through the drab corners of her surroundings in search of meaning, pleasure, or a way out. Like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, she dreams of a different life, finding refuge in films, fantasies, and daydreams as she struggles to escape the monotony and emptiness of her everyday existence.
Tag: ROMANIA
Stéphane, a young Parisian, goes to Romania to search for Nora Luca, a Roma singer harshly criticized by Roma activists for allegedly denigrating Roma’s image that his father listened to incessantly in the last days of his life. His search takes him to a gypsy village where he befriends Izidor and witnesses the pains and joys of the Romani experience.
A poor young man, Stoicea, becomes obsessed with finding Califar, a mysterious miller rumored to grant wealth. When he finally reaches the mill, he experiences a life of sudden prosperity and success. However, this new reality proves to be an illusion crafted by Califar. In the end, the story reveals a dark moral about greed, temptation, and the deceptive nature of material desires.
With his monumental ‘film fresco’ Ferenc Kósa erected a monument to the peasant revolt led by György Dózsa (16th century). Although under the Marxist interpretation of history of the period the revolt was frequently simplified down to an early example of ‘class struggle’, in the screenplay of Ferenc Kósa and Sándor Csoóri the depiction of historical events bears the universally valid formulation of questions about revolution and violence, while the figure of Dózsa – thanks also to the characterization of Ferenc Bessenyei – takes on a more lifelike and human aspect.
At 10 years old, Corina dreams of being admitted to the famous gymnastics school in Deva, a small town in Romania known for having trained an impressive number of Olympic champions. First refused, Corina manages, through training and sacrifice, to pass the entrance test just like her best friend Maria. From then on, the real test begins for them: becoming the best in the world.
At Sulina, a small town in the Danube Delta, three men and a woman belonging to three different generations survive from one day to the other one. People say that Sulina was called Europolis in the past. But the flourishing town of the past has sunk into oblivion and is surrounded by marshes. Thomas Ciulei has scrutinized the life of three generations of Romanians who try to build their life in this abandoned city as well as they can.
During the anti-communist revolution in Romania in 1989, political exile Paul Weiss struggles to learn the fate of a childhood friend. As he slowly uncovers the truth, he descends into a world of revolutionary chaos, imprisonment and attempted assassination.
A Greek-American filmmaker, known simply as «A», returns to his hometown in northern Greece for a screening of his latest controversial film. His real reason for coming back, however, is to track down three long-missing reels of film by Greece’s pioneering Manakia brothers who in the early years of cinema traveled through the Balkans, ignoring national and ethnic strife and recording ordinary people, especially craftsmen, on film. Their images, he believes, hold the key to lost innocence and essential truth, to an understanding of Balkan history.