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SEVILLE 2013

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism: behind fiction

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- The Sevillian official section welcomes Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu’s third film, a static and discursive portrait of what’s hidden behind a film shoot

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism: behind fiction

When evening falls on Bucharest or Metabolism [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
 is Corneliu Porumboiu’s third feature film. The 38-year-old Romanian filmmaker won the Caméra d’Or in Cannes 2006 with his debut film 12:08 East of Bucharest [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Corneliu Porumboiu
interview: Daniel Burlac
film profile
]
, besides going all over the planet from festival to festival. His second film, Police, Adjective [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Corneliu Porumboiu
film profile
]
, made it to Un Certain Regard, going on to win the FIPRESCI and Jury prizes. He now hits the Seville European Film Festival’s official section –as well as the Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival- with another film likely to be enthusiastically received by the festival after visiting Locarno and Sarajevo.

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Porumboiu first shows his characters inside a car driving through a city: a man, Paul, and a woman, Alina. We soon discover that they are a filmmaker and an actress – but we can’t see their faces, we can only hear their voices. The camera is placed in the backseat and turns us into guest passengers, in order to share their intimacy. Paul is quickly seen as a neurotic man, pondering about the future of cinema, talking about new ways of consuming it and its uncertain evolution. He’d also like to film Alina nude in the movie they’re making together – a film within a film. Director and actress, far from the stage and the spotlight.

What comes next is the report of a shooting from a totally unromantic point of view – this is not Truffaut’s Day for Night. Through the still camera and distant shots that paint cold pictures, Porumboiu shows before our eyes a hidden, dependent, changeable and full of lies relationship of a couple whose expiry date is decided by the shooting of the film. Paul (Bogdan Dumitrache – Child’s Pose [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Calin Peter Netzer
film profile
]
) will do whatever he can to stretch the shooting, which will make a fool out of him in front of the producer.

The viewer doesn’t think very often about what’s behind the shooting of a film: strict relationships, jealousy, ambition and other miseries. We are forced to attend those rehearsals that can change scripts, those meals that can reveal how ignorant some film workers can be and the analysis of those little miseries that everyone of us, in one way or another, also discloses when the spotlights of our little own fiction –our life– go off.

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(Translated from Spanish)

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