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.
Tag: ROMANIA
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.
This 1956 Romanian short animation skilfully and with incredible artistic expression manages to condense the entire narrative of human evolutionary theory into an eight minute short film. Not only that, it eerily anticipates the communist triumph of the USSR launching the first man into space by a few years.
——UPGRADED——
Very early in the morning, Marian, a 7-year-old boy from a small and isolated town in Romania, wakes up his father and convinces him to go to the city, to fix his old television. Despite the bad weather, the father finally agrees. Marian and her father begin the journey, carrying the television set, hoping that in the city they will find Bichescu, a specialist, who will fix their problem. A short road-movie about the father-son relationship and the importance of little things in life.
In a medieval village lives a marriage of old people, who have always wanted to have a child. The years passed and God did not grant them that happiness. A day in the forest a UFO appears, from which mysterious creatures come out and leave a child abandoned.
An ex-convict struggles to survive by brute force alone in a turn-of-the-century slum in Braila. Codine is the thug who served 10 years for murdering a friend. He returns home to his miserly mother, whose penny-pinching ways infuriate her son. A young boy looks up to Codine, and through the man’s eyes he sees the economic and social injustices from an adult perspective.