Set during the last year of the Ceausescu regime, Catalin Mitulescu’s first feature is another Cannes prize-winner and also boasts the support of Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders, both of whom are listed as executive producers. 17-year old Eva (Dorotheea Petre) lives with her parents and her 7-year old brother in Bucharest. One day Eva and her boyfriend Alex accidentally break a bust of Ceausescu and are forced to face a disciplinary committee. Alex is protected by his Party-officer father, but Eva is sent to a reformatory. There she meets Andrei (Cristian Vararu), a boy from a dissident family, and decides to escape Romania with him by crossing the Danube. Mitulescu’s richly textured film is not so much a chronicle of Romania’s troubled history but more a fairy-tale recreation of the past in the poetic style of a Federico Fellini (Amarcord) or Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives).

Plus Traffic (Trafic), Catalin Mitulescu’s celebrated short about a disaffected businessman and the distractions he experiences whilst caught in a traffic jam. ROMANIA • 2004 • SUBTITLED • COLOUR • DOLBY STEREO • 15 MIN