Discoveries from Romania World Cinema

A short tourist film that captures the beauty of Greece through authentic shots, warm lights and moments of tranquility. An invitation to discover simple life and the connection with nature.

A happily married teacher finds out that a child of hers she believed dead for 10 tears is alive. On the trail of her first lover, she reconnects with her lost daughter.

A provincial young girl, a farming engineer, does not want to return to the countryside on graduating, but stay in the capital. But she needs a Bucharest identity card to do this. Her solution is to "buy" a husband...

During the 1970s a foreign smuggler is taking hostages and threatening to sabotage a river pumping station if he is not aided in his attempt to smuggle ancient artifacts out of Romania.Two young local boys foil his plans.

Nine couples attend a weekend retreat to mend their troubled relationships, only to find their counselors need more help than they do.

A story of revolution, betrayal, corruption and wrongful imprisonment, as well as human character and strength while facing them.

Two girls begin to chat about another girl, a former lover of both. As they grow closer, the gap between them widens, as one them is looking for answers and love while safely closeted. A try-out for love confined within suffocating prejudices, in today's Romania.

An animated feature-length documentary telling the story of the life of Crulic, a 33 year-old Romanian accused of having stolen a wallet from an important Polish judge. Crulic was brought to the Krakow Detention Center Custody prison. He decided to start a hunger strike from the day he was arrested, demanding a meeting with somebody from the Romanian Consulate.

A Romanian drama‑comedy that follows a group of ordinary people whose lives become unexpectedly interconnected after a small event sets off a chain reaction of coincidences. Set in a modern Romanian town, the film blends humor and emotion as it explores how chance, timing, and minor decisions shape the characters’ futures. Each storyline reveals a different idea of what it means to be lucky: • escaping trouble, • finding love, • getting a second chance, • or simply learning to appreciate what you already have. As the characters’ paths cross in unexpected ways, the film highlights how fortune can appear in disguise — sometimes arriving as chaos, sometimes as opportunity. Ultimately, movie offers a warm, human portrait of everyday people discovering meaning in life’s unpredictable moments.

The film tells the story of a man, Mihai, who is going through midlife crisis. After a 15 years marriage, he tries to regain control over his own life and starts an affair. Though Mihai is the main character of the film, he is never seen onscreen, but his personality is shown through his mistress, mother and wife, as well as through gestures and attitude.

Lexi, a 19-year-old girl, poor, with a life full of difficulties, writes lyrics and music in a notebook. Before an important meeting that can change her life and in which her notebook would play a crucial role, Lexi loses the notebook.

When a couple returns to their apartment building on Christmas Eve, they find a man dressed as Santa Claus trying to break into their neighbor's apartment.

Sami is a passionate visual artist with a keen eye for the world's untold stories. Tonight, he steps away from the comfort of artistic abstraction at a vibrant party, seeking authenticity amidst the chaos of a city in upheaval. Drawn to the raw energy of street protests, Sami finds himself in a reality far beyond the scope of his camera—a reality where the lines between observer and participant blur. As he navigates the complexities of truth, power, and freedom, Sami's journey becomes an exploration of resilience and the cost of integrity in the face of injustice. The Capture invites audiences on a gripping journey through the beauty and pain of standing up for one's beliefs, challenging us to question where we draw our own lines.

Single mother and nurse Alina is confronted with an ethical problem when she tries to find a huge sum of money to prevent her 22-year-old son Radu from going to jail.

A documentary about Sulina a dying small port city in the Danube Delta (Romania).

A love story sprinkled with spies. A young hero pilot is vulnerable in front of foreign agents due to his love. Based on the novel "Zbor de noapte" (Night Flight) by Nicolae Tăutu. Acting debut for Ion Besoiu

This is the story of a young woman, Dorina, working in a sex shop in Bucharest, after being forced to interrupt her studies to care for her parents. Because of her job, everyone considers her to be something other than what she is - a fragile and unhappy woman, forced to live a life she does not deserve and for which she is not ready. And soon, things get out of control. The story of Dorina may be the story of all of us who are leading a life, inside which we feel prisoners and which we do not deserve.

An adventure movie for children and young people about the solidarity of a group of schoolboys who help their schoolmate to foil an attempt to compromise his father, who was about to be involved in a theft of timber from the warehouse where he was a guard. Based on a novel by Nicuta Tanase.

“Why me?” focuses on some of the aspects of the New Romanian Cinema, using its own aesthetics. The short film describes the ridicule situation three film-makers create when all their paths to “glory” seem to be blocked. The only solution they find to their problem is an extreme one.

Mircea Moraru, the owner of a Romanian media giant, gets involved into politics, in order to lower the financial deficit of his company. As the elections draw closer, attention is focused on the suspicions which arose shortly after Moraru stepped into the life of politics, regarding some financial misconducts. Moraru has to resist the siege, lead by two of his former friends and associates, who are trying to take advantage of the situation and remove him from his leading position in the company. This is yet another battle for Moraru, who sticks to his principles, even though they had cost him his family.

Told in three parts, the film serves as a metaphor for the stages of life and presents itself as a determinist statement piece from a philosophical point of view.

The main characters are two "Don Juans", professional "fiancees", who travel the country in search of desperate women willing to spend money to find their soulmates.

Set in the dense forests of 1940s Eastern Europe, this story reveals the supernatural encounters that challenge three soldiers' understanding of life and death.

Vlad Thought is a young artist from Iasi, who works on cruise ships. Having just returned home, he witnesses a hit-and-run, but is considered the perpetrator and ends up in prison. The welcoming from the other inmates is not exactly pleasant. A man of faith and with a sensitive nature, he is forced to adapt to the realities of prison life.

Set in the period prior to the revolt in Timisoara in December 1989 and mirroring the events that led to the downfall of the dictator Ceausescu.

Marina, a girl from a stunt team, passively assists to everyone's rush to choose the protagonist without whom the filming cannot begin. After weeks of nothing happening, the director, reviewing the footage on the screen, is struck by the photogenic photo of a young girl in an extras scene, which no one can identify. Marina doesn't want to reveal the secret to those on the set because, more pragmatically, her goal is different: admission to cybernetics!

Vitoria, a strong-willed peasant woman from the mountains, sets out on a relentless journey to find out what happened to her husband, the shepherd Nechifor, who disappeared without a trace after leaving to buy sheep.

When high-school literature teacher Ana Bauch innocently recommends a film to her students, a parent's complaint spirals her life into chaos.

A few unrelated groups of people leave for vacation from Bucharest for the mountains. They meet by chance in Poiana Brașov.

The movie depicts a peasant with a very strong personality that copes with the changes in the Romanian village.

An agronomist manages to irrigate and stabilize some sand dunes in southern Romania.

Matters of the heart weave themselves into a love pentagon between five actors as they rehearse for a stage play in Bucharest's historic quarter.

Part of a series of promotional films commissioned by Romania's National Tourism Office in the early 1970s with the aim of reconnecting diasporic communities with the country they left behind. In this case, the film is addressed to Jews who emigrated in the context of the Second World War or were sold by the Romanian state to the State of Israel starting in the 50s and settled in Israel and the USA - therefore, a target group made up of seniors, probably retired , possibly prosperous, eager to revisit the places of youth and willing to forget, temporarily, the traumas associated with them.

A short film documenting the city of Bucharest, The Carpathian mountains, Brasov and Various castles in Romania including Bran and Peles Castle.

In 19th century Wallachia war-bands of Ottoman Turks from across the Danube river raid Wallachia with impunity, while Wallachia's Phanariote rulers don't oppose them.

Two hit men wait for their next target in an empty apartment. The hours go by. Little by little, they start losing their patience and their temper. Pretty soon, they may even lose their lives. Killing time can be a deadly affair.

Five young high school graduates are preparing for college admissions in one of the largest and most important university centers, Cluj. Once they become students, the lives of the five change, and the results will be commensurate with the work of each.

While fully enjoying the life of the 70's, in communist Romania, a young man is arrested and accused of a terrible crime. Freed a few years later and deeply affected by his sinister experience, he tries to find out what had really happened.

A story based on real events that happened in Zimnicea, Romania, on March, 4, 1977, the day of the great earthquake. Everybody knows that 80% of the city was destroyed on that day, and 40 years later, they learn by whom.

Alex's birthday is approaching, and his father Calin has prepared a very special surprise: the first night with a girl. The cast includes young actors Alfredo Minea and Cristiana Luca, along with reknown actors Mimi Brănescu and Elvira Deatcu.

A circus family encounters hard times and family strife, but is brought into the limelight through their chance encounter with a polar bear cub.

After surviving a shipwreck in the Caribbean, a captain returns home burdened by guilt and haunted by the past. Given command a ship bound for Singapore, he is treated with suspicion and hostility by his new crew.

Cosmin plays a tennis game with 3 friends. He looks at the clock and starts panicking: he is late to the Registry Office, to a wedding- his wedding, with his ex-wife, who he had divorced without his friends knowing. Everything starts in 2007 when the real-estate bubble reaches its peak. Cosmin gifts Reli a land on the edge of a lake, for their wedding anniversary. He plans to build 7 villas, sell them and win 1 million Euros.

Bucharest, 1876. Don Dumitrache instructs his trusted man, Chiriac, to watch his young wife, Veta. Dumitrache is sure that Veta having an affair, she does not know is that her lover is Chiriac own...

A woman tries to regain her dignity, both in her personal life and her career, after spending five years in prison, because of a false accusation that she was a saboteur.

In a small provincial town, members of the Illegalist Movement are feverishly preparing for Liberation Day. The Fre Freckle, a cute 14-year-old boy, becomes the hero of these events, which are being led from the shadows by his friend and comrade Andrei. With the help of his history teacher, his father and, more often than not, his dog Calu, the boy faces any challenge with ease and courage.

An investigation is launched following an accident at a chemical plant. During the investigation, Andrei, a young engineer at the plant, proves his moral qualities.

Ducu is a a 45-year-old Romanian writer facing a midlife crisis. He leaves Bucharest to be part of a creative residence in Berlin and in an attempt to rebuild his life. He swings between two countries and two women: Andra, his hot-tempered wife, who wants a divorce, and Giulia, Ducu's love from his youth, who lives in an eco-village in Germany - Lebensdorf. Looking for an answer, he goes through a series of strange, funny and even eye-opening events.

For over a hundred years, Mărculești was a vibrant Jewish agricultural and mercantile community in Bessarabia (now present-day Moldova). In July 1941, the village was the site of an unimaginable atrocity. Seventy-three years later, few speak honestly or completely about what happened. ABSENT is a cinematic portrait of the ghost village of Mărculești, its current inhabitants, and their very complex relationship to their own history. Filmed entirely on location, the film documents one of Europe's poorest, most remote, and least-visited places.

How would a found footage film look if the footage was never found? This conceptual art experiment questions the very nature of film and cinema while serving as an ironic tribute to the found footage horror pop culture. The found footage format provides the narrative justification for such a film to exist: the non-existence exists because the footage existed yet it was lost and never found.

This film is a puzzle, which fits together in many different ways, only one of which is right. And all of which are deadly.

31-year-old Vera is a vet in a small-town zoo veterinarian in Transylvania. After losing her new-born baby, she becomes obsessed with giving him the proper Eastern Orthodox burial rituals, spends more time at work and subsequently drifts apart from her husband, Toma. One day a tiger escapes from the zoo…

After a devastating flood destroys their home, Costache and Maria struggle to rebuild their lives. As family tensions resurface with the return of their son with his Japanese wife and child, Costache faces the challenge of reconnecting across generations.

Fanita, a young man desirous to earn money as a result of personals initiatives, will fail in all these businesses , is ultimately convinced to enter in the Agricultural Production Comradeship or Community from his village.

Irina wants to go to school, get her degree and escape her dysfunctional family. Liviu, her cousin, is a businessman who lives in a village. He doesn’t believe much in the importance of an education and finds himself at loggerheads with Irina, who would sacrifice anything to go to school.

Based on true events. In the Romanian town of Lupeni August 5, 1929, driven to despair by hard labor conditions miners under the leadership of Communists organized a strike. The miners demanded higher wages and an eight-hour workday. They opposed the government's attempts to shift the entire burden of the economic crisis onto the workers' shoulders. The government, concerned about the scale of the strike and the workers' determination not to give in to their demands, ordered troops to shoot at unarmed people. On August 7, the strike was brutally suppressed. Many workers were killed. But these events have forever gone down in the history of the Romanian labor movement as an example of solidarity, heroism and invincibility of the people.

After the suspicious death of his best friend Nic, Stefan, a fifty-year-old businessman, uncovers the unknown part of their relationship and has to come to terms with his new life.

On the outskirts of Budapest, in the heart of the woods, hides a ramshackle little hut. Inside, two social outcasts have formed the unlikeliest of bonds: Fanni, a 19 year-old transgender teenager, and Laci, a 60 year-old homeless man. Together, they form a cantankerous, convivial, makeshift family life, supporting each other as father and daughter through hardship and change. Life is tough, but it is theirs. Set on the margins of Hungarian society, this is a film about perseverance, finding home, and the triumph of acceptance.