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FESTIVALS Romania / USA

Romanian cinema in the USA

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- The ninth edition of Making Waves, a festival for Romanian cinema, kicks off on 4 December at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center

Romanian cinema in the USA
Where Are You, Bucharest? by Vlad Petri

At the beginning of December, a batch of Romanian films will travel across the Atlantic to be screened at the Making Waves Film Festival, dedicated to new Romanian cinema. The gathering introduces the latest crop of Romanian films to local audiences. “We all know that fashions come and go, especially in this volatile film world where critics grow tired of certain trends and always look forward to the next best thing. It's also true that not all the good Romanian films make it to the big international festivals; that's why I think it's important, whenever possible, to design and maintain a professional and specific platform like this Romanian Film Festival in New York, and offer them a chance to be seen and judged in a broader context,” says artistic director Mihai Chirilov.

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“Each edition is really different in composition and ‘design’, although the categories remain the same: fiction, documentary, shorts, Artist in Focus, Creative Freedom through Cinema… and this is due to our own wish as a creative team to give personality to each year’s crop,” explains the festival's president, Corina Suteu. Giving an insight into this year's edition, Chirilov reveals, “There's a stronger presence of independent films made with no state funds, like Corneliu Porumboiu's latest effort, The Second Game [+see also:
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; the provocative documentary Where Are You, Bucharest? by Vlad Petri, which was presented at Rotterdam this year and centres on Romanian politics; and all seven short films in the programme.” The Romanian nomination for the Academy Award for Best Foreign-language Film, Tudor Cristian Jurgiu's examination of family relationships, The Japanese Dog [+see also:
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, will be presented alongside a selection of the best Romanian shorts. The ninth edition of the festival will also be a chance to look back on the past through cinema, as demonstrated in Valentin Hotea's Roxanne [+see also:
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, in which the lead character must revisit his personal history to find out who denounced him to Nicolae Ceausescu's secret police, and will learn along the way that he could be a father, or in the closing film, Maya Vitkova's Viktoria [+see also:
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interview: Maya Vitkova
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]
, a powerful coming-of-age tale.

The festival will also celebrate director Stere Gulea's 40-year career. In addition to his latest film, the nostalgic comedy I Am an Old Communist Hag [+see also:
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, starring the dame of the Romanian New Wave, Luminița Gheorghiu, Fox-Hunter, State of Things and The Journey will all be screened in Gulea's honour. Besides the main programme, the organisers have also included a special sidebar focusing on the relationship between art and politics in Eastern Europe, entitled “Creative Freedom through Cinema”; in this year's edition, the section will deal with LGBTQ rights in Russia by screening Pavel Loparev and Askold Kurov's Children 404, and Sergei Taramajev and Liubov Lvova's Winter Journey. The festival runs from 4-8 December at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, and then from 5-10 December at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville.

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