The New Romanian Cinema

At the beginning of 2019, San Francisco Public Library’s Art, Music, and Recreation Department launched World Cinema Time, a program featuring foreign films with English subtitles. The screenings happen once a month on Tuesday evenings in the Koret Auditorium.

Tonight's screening at 5:30 PM will be Romanian director Calin Peter Netzer’s film Child’s Pose, the winner of the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013.

Although cinema arrived in Romania at the end of the 19th century, the nation has only begun to make award-winning films in the 21st century with the so-called New Romanian Cinema.  The Death of Mr. Lazarescu directed by by Cristi Puiu which won the Un Certain Regard award at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2005 opened the floodgates for Romanian films to bag 28 international awards by the end of 2018.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (dir. Cristian Mungiu) became the first Romanian film to win Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007, and caused a controversy when it didn’t make the Foreign Language Film shortlist for Oscars. This film perhaps remains the Romanian film with the strong reputation.
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Scholarship on Romanian cinema is scant by international standards. But a basic keyword search (Romanian cinema) in databases such as Art Full Text and Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text will yield a wealth of information on various aspects of Romanian cinema.

We can recommend the DVDs in our collection:

 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (2007)
 
Child's Pose (2013)
 
Beyond the Hills (2012)

The way I Spent the End of the World (2006)
 
Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005)

12:08 East of Bucharest (2006)