On the sixteenth year anniversary of the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a local anchorman of a nearby provincial town invites two of his acquaintances to share their moments of revolutionary glory on his talk show. One is an impish, insightful retiree who sometimes poses as Santa Claus, the other a henpecked, hard-drinking teacher who has just devoted his entire salary to his drinking debts. Together they will remember the day when they...

In a gripping tale of best intentions gone wrong, leading Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean (Tuesday, After Christmas) follows a trio of well-meaning aid workers from Bucharest on a food delivery mission to the rural hinterlands of the Întregalde area of Transylvania. Guided off the beaten path by an elderly villager looking for a local sawmill, they find themselves trapped in an unfamiliar, dangerous place and facing the outer limits of their goodwill...

A young woman and her friend make their way to a black market doctor and face the choice as to whether or not one of them should have an illegal abortion.

Luminita Gheorghiu (*The Death of Mr. Lazarescu*) stars as a steely, well-to-do Bucharest architect determined to keep her 30-something deadbeat son out of jail after a deadly car crash. How far will she go to convince the police, eyewitnesses and even the victim’s family that her son was not recklessly speeding? A spellbinding drama of social commentary and psychological realism, this caustic look into the corrupt heart of the Eastern European...

A mesmerizing new masterwork from Cristi Puiu (*The Death of Mr. Lazarescu*), AURORA is a murder mystery turned on its head. Inside a non-descript apartment, a man and a woman converse, their voices hushed, mindful of waking the little girl sleeping in the next room. Behind a line of abandoned trailers, on the outskirts of Bucharest, the same man waits for something or someone to arrive. At a nearby factory, he collects two hand-made firing pins secretly...

In 1981, chalk slogans written in uppercase letters started appearing in public spaces in the Romanian city of Botosani. They demanded freedom, alluded to the democratic developments taking place in Romania's socialist sister countries, or simply called for improvements in the food supply. The culprit was Mugur Calinescu, a teenager who was still at school at the time and whose case is documented in the files of the Romanian secret police. Theatre...

A boy and a girl, both high school teenagers, decide to get away from the world and be alone for the afternoon, so they decide to hide in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of town. While there, they get stuck in a cargo elevator. Tensions rise when they realize that their world has been reduced to a small metal box, especially after a failed escape attempt.

Costi is a workaday family man whose cash-strapped next-door neighbor makes him an intriguing proposition: help him find the fortune reportedly buried somewhere on the grounds of his family's country home and split the profits. But as the two men dig, they unearth more than they bargained for, excavating not only dirt, but traces of Romania's often tumultuous history.

Planning to spend a romantic weekend with his long-distance boyfriend, Christi's tender reunion is cut short when he is called in to handle a crisis at work. Christi is a member of the Bucharest police force, and his unit is sent to quell a protest at a local movie theater, where a far-right group has interrupted the screening of a queer film. As tensions between the homophobic protesters and the audience mount, Christi, closeted to his fellow officers,...

Set in early nineteenth century Romania, a policeman, Costandin, is hired by a nobleman to find a Gypsy slave who has run away from his estate after having an affair with his wife.