As Selman Nacar’s film opens, the bus rolls into Uşak, carrying Musa (Oğulcan Arman Uslu), a man whose whole future hangs in that balance. At the end, the camera tracks back out in one slow, graceful movement which sees the city recede until its significance is restored to proper context. It is not the whole world, no matter how commonplace some of its woes might be, and Musa’s story is just one of billions playing out at the same time. Nevertheless, there’s a particularity about Uşak which, whilst we are there, casts a spell. It’s present in Ahmet barak Gurbuz’s meticulously designed soundscape, with its low industrial hums, its dripping, its constant weight. It’s there in Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s exquisite, drably saturated greens and blues. Briefly glimpsed through windows and on hurried journeys, the sky hangs heavy overhead, a storm waiting to break.
- 5/29/2024
- by Jennie Kermode
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu and his Bucharest-based company Mobra Films will join forces with Poland’s Kijora Films on “Tales of the Golden Age – The Warsaw Pact,” a follow up to his 2009 sketch comedy referencing urban legends from the Ceausescu regime.
Expanding to accommodate stories from different ex-communist Eastern European countries, including Poland, it will be written by Mungiu and directed by Ioana Uricaru. France’s Les Films du Worso is also on board.
“Perhaps the most important function of comedy is to help us confront negative emotions and terrible events, and give us a way to talk about them that makes them less frightening. The most effective comedies are set in tragic situations,” Mungiu and Uricaru said in a statement.
“The stories presented in the script take place at a dark moment in history and talk about very grim issues in that comical and absurd way – one...
Expanding to accommodate stories from different ex-communist Eastern European countries, including Poland, it will be written by Mungiu and directed by Ioana Uricaru. France’s Les Films du Worso is also on board.
“Perhaps the most important function of comedy is to help us confront negative emotions and terrible events, and give us a way to talk about them that makes them less frightening. The most effective comedies are set in tragic situations,” Mungiu and Uricaru said in a statement.
“The stories presented in the script take place at a dark moment in history and talk about very grim issues in that comical and absurd way – one...
- 2/19/2024
- by Marta Balaga
- Variety Film + TV
In the late 20th century, a system of categorizing personalities into “Type A” and “Type B” gained mainstream pop-psychological traction. The theory may have since fallen out of favor, but sometimes it’s hard not to be reminded of it, like when watching Selman Nacar’s sober, stressful second feature, “Hesitation Wound.” Defense attorney Canan is competitive, status-conscious, ambitious and impatient to the point of work addiction. In other words, she’s the Type A-est Type A to ever have had a very hard day.
Nacar, who studied law himself, has written a screenplay that piles incident on incident, and moral quandary on moral quandary, each bumping into the rear of the next like a knock-on collision in rush hour traffic. But he directs with a spontaneity that means the drama never seems contrived, especially as conveyed in the considered realism of Tudor Panduru’s cinematography. Panduru, who has been...
Nacar, who studied law himself, has written a screenplay that piles incident on incident, and moral quandary on moral quandary, each bumping into the rear of the next like a knock-on collision in rush hour traffic. But he directs with a spontaneity that means the drama never seems contrived, especially as conveyed in the considered realism of Tudor Panduru’s cinematography. Panduru, who has been...
- 9/18/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Canan, the hardworking legal-eagle protagonist of Hesitation Wound, moves through drab institutional corridors with such determination that she creates a kind of force field around her. Or maybe it’s armor. In the courthouse where she spends a good part of her waking hours, she’s trying to save an accused man from the possibility of life imprisonment. In the hospital where she spends her nights, she’s looking for reasons to keep her mother on life support, despite the certainty of the doctor — and, more to the point, of Canan’s sister — that it’s time to let go.
Unfolding at the intersection of regulatory procedure, moral urgency and heartache, Selman Nacar’s finely tuned second feature, after the workplace drama Between Two Dawns, packs a sustained wallop of tension and unraveling into its impressively concise running time. Tülin Özen, in the lead role, delivers a pitch-perfect, tightly contained...
Unfolding at the intersection of regulatory procedure, moral urgency and heartache, Selman Nacar’s finely tuned second feature, after the workplace drama Between Two Dawns, packs a sustained wallop of tension and unraveling into its impressively concise running time. Tülin Özen, in the lead role, delivers a pitch-perfect, tightly contained...
- 9/4/2023
- by Sheri Linden
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
It is 1972, in Bucharest. Ceaușescu has been in power for seven years, and the fabric of ordinary life has been steeped long enough in his regime’s corrosively oppressive mandate that it has begun to fray. Yet against this backdrop of gathering gloom, bright, fresh first love is blossoming. This is already a fertile setup for an atmospheric, doomed romance, but Alexandru Belc’s slow, stylish, richly imagined feature debut is much more than a Romanian riff on Romeo and Juliet. A metronome keeps time for musicians; “Metronom” describes how insidiously even the young — those most inclined toward rebellion and optimistic self-expression in any society — can be made to fall in step with authoritarianism’s joyless, frogmarching beat.
With this story of individual relationships stressed by systemic fearmongering, writer-director Belc — who previously worked with Cristian Mungiu and Corneliu Porumboiu, and picked up the directing award in this year’s Un...
With this story of individual relationships stressed by systemic fearmongering, writer-director Belc — who previously worked with Cristian Mungiu and Corneliu Porumboiu, and picked up the directing award in this year’s Un...
- 5/30/2022
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Anyone looking to take the temperature of Cristian Mungiu’s first film in six long years should heed the words of Matthias, his most recent downtrodden protagonist: “People who feel pity die first,” he explains to his 8-year-old son. “I want you to die last.” Too much? Try the more eloquent musings of the local priest: “Everyone has their place in the world, as God ordained.” Translation: go back to where you came from.
The Romanian filmmaker returns with R.M.N., a portrait of Europe, perhaps the world, in the days of late capitalism. As bitter and biting as its winter landscape, it stars Marin Grigore as a Hungarian immigrant in a small village nestled amongst the snowy forests and sweeping mountains of Transylvania. Working in crisp blues and greys from Tudor Vladimir Panduru, Mungiu sketches the town as a modern Babel: Romanian, Hungarian, French, German, Sri Lankan, and English are all spoken,...
The Romanian filmmaker returns with R.M.N., a portrait of Europe, perhaps the world, in the days of late capitalism. As bitter and biting as its winter landscape, it stars Marin Grigore as a Hungarian immigrant in a small village nestled amongst the snowy forests and sweeping mountains of Transylvania. Working in crisp blues and greys from Tudor Vladimir Panduru, Mungiu sketches the town as a modern Babel: Romanian, Hungarian, French, German, Sri Lankan, and English are all spoken,...
- 5/25/2022
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
Chekhov’s gun has seldom fallen into hands as steady and menacing hands as in Cristian Mungiu’s poorly titled, expertly staged “R.M.N.,” which finds the elite Romanian auteur extrapolating the personal tensions that gripped his previous work across an entire Transylvanian village. The result is ; a slightly over-broad story of timeless xenophobia baked full of local flavor and set right on the cusp of a specific moment in the 21st century.
The film begins far away from the snowy hamlet where most of it takes place, as the bull-headed Matthias (Marin Grigore) unceremoniously quits his job at a German slaughterhouse by head-butting his boss for calling him a “lazy Gypsy.” And so, with few other options and the cops on his tail, Matthias returns to the financially dispossessed hometown where he left his young wife Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu) and their young son Rudi (Mark Blenyesi...
The film begins far away from the snowy hamlet where most of it takes place, as the bull-headed Matthias (Marin Grigore) unceremoniously quits his job at a German slaughterhouse by head-butting his boss for calling him a “lazy Gypsy.” And so, with few other options and the cops on his tail, Matthias returns to the financially dispossessed hometown where he left his young wife Ana (Macrina Bârlădeanu) and their young son Rudi (Mark Blenyesi...
- 5/21/2022
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
R.M.N. Trailer — Cristian Mungiu‘s R.M.N. (2022) movie trailer has been released. The R.M.N. trailer stars Judith State, Marin Grigore, Macrina Barladeanu, Orsolya Moldován, Rácz Endre, József Bíró, and Ovidiu Crisan. Crew Cristian Mungiu wrote the screenplay for R.M.N.. Mircea Olteanu conducted the film editing for the film. Tudor Vladimir Panduru crafted the cinematography for the [...]
Continue reading: R.M.N. (2022) Movie Trailer: A Father tries to Reconnect with His Son in Cristian Mungiu’s Drama Film...
Continue reading: R.M.N. (2022) Movie Trailer: A Father tries to Reconnect with His Son in Cristian Mungiu’s Drama Film...
- 5/19/2022
- by Rollo Tomasi
- Film-Book
Yesterday we took a look at Nicholas Bell’s top 5 most anticipated films for Cannes 2022. Now it’s my turn.
Competition:
R.M.N.
He usually takes about a half decade between features and so this longer than normal gestation period since 2016’s Graduation is nothing to be too concerned about. Recently picked up by the IFC Films folks, Cristian Mungiu commenced shooting on his fifth feature film in late 2022. We can expect more cerebral film realism cinema from this master filmmaker — who reteams with cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru (who also has another film in Cannes with Metronom). His fifth feature film appears to be a tale about unchecked or unresolved feelings raising to the surface — amped up by small village conflict that disrupts the fragile eco-system.…...
Competition:
R.M.N.
He usually takes about a half decade between features and so this longer than normal gestation period since 2016’s Graduation is nothing to be too concerned about. Recently picked up by the IFC Films folks, Cristian Mungiu commenced shooting on his fifth feature film in late 2022. We can expect more cerebral film realism cinema from this master filmmaker — who reteams with cinematographer Tudor Vladimir Panduru (who also has another film in Cannes with Metronom). His fifth feature film appears to be a tale about unchecked or unresolved feelings raising to the surface — amped up by small village conflict that disrupts the fragile eco-system.…...
- 5/18/2022
- by Eric Lavallée
- IONCINEMA.com
A humanitarian aid distribution center, a mild chaos of activity and people, all of them gathering up bags of food and supplies, loading them into SUVs, and heading off down mountain roads. It’s a public-facing show of altruism that gets laid down flat in Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean’s latest, “Întregalde,” an incisive, mirthlessly amusing satire about the social contours of charity.
The camera briefly settles on Bucharest aid workers Cristina (Carmen Lopazan) and Radu (a quick cameo from director Muntean), and just as quickly abandons them after a scene-setting conversation about grateful aid recipients and the moral quicksand of loving one’s own virtuousness.
The story then follows three volunteers who split off from the other two: easily irritated Dan, pragmatic Ilinca and earnest Maria. Once inside Dan’s Land Rover, they’re free to gossip about Radu and Cristina and the vacation home they’re buying.
The three are headed for Întregalde,...
The camera briefly settles on Bucharest aid workers Cristina (Carmen Lopazan) and Radu (a quick cameo from director Muntean), and just as quickly abandons them after a scene-setting conversation about grateful aid recipients and the moral quicksand of loving one’s own virtuousness.
The story then follows three volunteers who split off from the other two: easily irritated Dan, pragmatic Ilinca and earnest Maria. Once inside Dan’s Land Rover, they’re free to gossip about Radu and Cristina and the vacation home they’re buying.
The three are headed for Întregalde,...
- 3/18/2022
- by Dave White
- The Wrap
When Netflix recommendation listed this work under ‘Hidden gems for you’, I took notice as I have been fortunate with this segment in the past. Though the title sounded cheesy, I was hoping that it was a play on words before revealing what is behind the curtain and I was not disappointed.
Manana is a daughter/wife/mother/teacher in her fifties who lives with the rest of her family in an apartment in a Georgian town. The quarters are just big enough for its seven inhabitants to call it home, but not large enough for peaceful coexistence. It is her birthday and friends and family gather to celebrate and wish her well, even when that is not Manana wants. The next day she informs her family that he has found another apartment in a different district and will be moving for good, as they are all capable of taking care of themselves.
Manana is a daughter/wife/mother/teacher in her fifties who lives with the rest of her family in an apartment in a Georgian town. The quarters are just big enough for its seven inhabitants to call it home, but not large enough for peaceful coexistence. It is her birthday and friends and family gather to celebrate and wish her well, even when that is not Manana wants. The next day she informs her family that he has found another apartment in a different district and will be moving for good, as they are all capable of taking care of themselves.
- 4/6/2021
- by Arun Krishnan
- AsianMoviePulse
There’s a scene in the middle of Hal Hartley’s 1992 indie “Simple Men” where a cryptic brunette played by gamin actress Elina Löwensohn — ice-pale, with blunt black bangs — interrupts the plot with a choreographed dance number to a fuzzy track by Sonic Youth. Hartley wanted to break the fourth wall, and here comes filmmaker Chiara Malta (who co-wrote the script with Sébastien Laudenbach and Marco Pettenello) to smash his rubble into dust with her playful narrative debut.
“Simple Women” spins that musical moment into a dizzying story about ambition and artistic competition in which Löwensohn plays herself as the object of obsession for an aspiring Italian director named Federica (Jasmine Trinca), who’s been fixated on Löwensohn’s “Simple Men” character since the ’90s for making epilepsy look glamorous. That Federica wears owl-eyed glasses that make her the mirror image of Malta is no coincidence in a movie that...
“Simple Women” spins that musical moment into a dizzying story about ambition and artistic competition in which Löwensohn plays herself as the object of obsession for an aspiring Italian director named Federica (Jasmine Trinca), who’s been fixated on Löwensohn’s “Simple Men” character since the ’90s for making epilepsy look glamorous. That Federica wears owl-eyed glasses that make her the mirror image of Malta is no coincidence in a movie that...
- 9/13/2019
- by Amy Nicholson
- Variety Film + TV
In the blue waiting room of an orphanage sits a Kyrgyz woman in a traditional head scarf, while in a nearby dormitory a young boy is awakened and told his mother has finally come to pick him up. As mother and son stride across the playground together, the other children envy his luck. But there’s something inscrutable about the pair: Zhipara (a beautifully careworn Perizat Ermanbaeva) seems more grimly determined than overjoyed at this reunion, after an unexplained 10-year separation. And Uluk (Daniel Daiyerbekov) looks wary, his eyes those of an old man, set deep and sad in his little-boy face.
This is the quietly arresting beginning to Russian director Elizaveta Stishova’s Kyrgyzstan-set “Suleiman Mountain,” a mixture of sober, ethnographic study and high melodrama that compels even when it doesn’t quite convince. Perhaps it’s Stishova’s outsider point of view that places the film indefinably but...
This is the quietly arresting beginning to Russian director Elizaveta Stishova’s Kyrgyzstan-set “Suleiman Mountain,” a mixture of sober, ethnographic study and high melodrama that compels even when it doesn’t quite convince. Perhaps it’s Stishova’s outsider point of view that places the film indefinably but...
- 7/14/2018
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
Dedicated to the discovery of new works by emerging and dynamic filmmaking talent, this year’s New Directors/New Films festival will screen 29 features and nine short films. This year’s lineup boasts nine North American premieres, seven U.S. premieres, and two world premieres, with features and shorts from 32 countries across five continents.
The opening, centerpiece, and closing night selections showcase three exciting new voices in American independent cinema that all recently debuted at Sundance: Geremy Jasper’s “Patti Cake$” is the opening night pick, while Eliza Hittman’s “Beach Rats” is the centerpiece selection and Dustin Guy Defa will close the festival with “Person to Person.”
Read More: 2017 New Directors/New Films Announces Full Lineup, Including ‘Patti Cake$,’ ‘Beach Rats,’ ‘Menashe’ and More
Now in its forty-sixth year, Nd/Nf has played home early films from such heavy hitters as Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodovar,...
The opening, centerpiece, and closing night selections showcase three exciting new voices in American independent cinema that all recently debuted at Sundance: Geremy Jasper’s “Patti Cake$” is the opening night pick, while Eliza Hittman’s “Beach Rats” is the centerpiece selection and Dustin Guy Defa will close the festival with “Person to Person.”
Read More: 2017 New Directors/New Films Announces Full Lineup, Including ‘Patti Cake$,’ ‘Beach Rats,’ ‘Menashe’ and More
Now in its forty-sixth year, Nd/Nf has played home early films from such heavy hitters as Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodovar,...
- 3/14/2017
- by Chris O'Falt, Eric Kohn, Jude Dry and Kate Erbland
- Indiewire
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu ("4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days") shot "Family Photos" (Fotografii de familie) under the radar from June 11 to July 24, 2015. Adrian Titieni ("Best Intentions," 4Proof Film) is starring in the leading role.
Mungiu's latest film is a family drama about parenting set in a small Romanian town where everybody knows everybody. It is the first feature in which Mungiu focuses on a male protagonist, a doctor. The cast includes Lia Bugnar and Vlad Ivanov. Shooting took place mostly in the town of Victoria, but the story is not set in that city. Thistime around Mungiu didn't work his long time collaborator Oleg Mutu, instead chose young cinematographer Tudor Panduru.
The project received a production grant of approximately 430,000 Eur/1.91 m Ron from the National Film Center at the beginning of 2015, the highest funding for a feature film in that session. The director told Fne at the end of March 2015 that he hoped to work again with the coproducers he had for Academy Award-shortlisted "Beyond the Hills."
"Beyond the Hills" was produced by Mungiu through Mobra Films in coproduction with Why Not Production, Wild Bunch, Les Films du Fleuve (www.lesfilmdufleuve.be), France 3 Cinéma (www.france3.fr) and Mandragora Movies Romania.
Mungiu's latest film is a family drama about parenting set in a small Romanian town where everybody knows everybody. It is the first feature in which Mungiu focuses on a male protagonist, a doctor. The cast includes Lia Bugnar and Vlad Ivanov. Shooting took place mostly in the town of Victoria, but the story is not set in that city. Thistime around Mungiu didn't work his long time collaborator Oleg Mutu, instead chose young cinematographer Tudor Panduru.
The project received a production grant of approximately 430,000 Eur/1.91 m Ron from the National Film Center at the beginning of 2015, the highest funding for a feature film in that session. The director told Fne at the end of March 2015 that he hoped to work again with the coproducers he had for Academy Award-shortlisted "Beyond the Hills."
"Beyond the Hills" was produced by Mungiu through Mobra Films in coproduction with Why Not Production, Wild Bunch, Les Films du Fleuve (www.lesfilmdufleuve.be), France 3 Cinéma (www.france3.fr) and Mandragora Movies Romania.
- 8/13/2015
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
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