Näher am Mond

Although Closer To The Moon is based on true events some scenes in the movie just seem not very plausible. Those scenes, that are quite unbelievable and make no sense at all, made this movie lesser good than it should have been. I really doubt the 'gangsters' were that happy in those times. In the end credits you see the actual footage of their propaganda movie and nobody seemed happy there, much more realistic than the whole movie is trying to show. The cast is really top, all actors did a good job with their respective characters, so that was the best thing about this movie and that was what makes it worth watching. Plus the excellent directing from Nae Caranfil, not so much for his writing though. Closer To The Moon isn't bad for a one time viewing.

It is always gratifying to find a film you do not know anything about and it becomes one of your favorite movies.

Director/writer Nae Caranfil has taken an obscure incident in Soviet occupied Romania in the late 1950's and has offered it up to the 21st century cinema to give us a most pertinent message for today's world.

That message is not robbing the bank! The message is to be found in how the system (society) can single out certain groups and marginalize them into committing a desperate act --- and not really have any reason to do this act but to just fight back.

The entire cast is perfect in their individual roles, the script is intelligent, the photography beautiful! This film should a 10 in anyones book!

Unless you have at least some basic knowledge about Communist Romania, this movie might seem very far away from a rating of 10. As the story unraveled, it sucked us into an atmosphere that most of us feel is long gone, and nevertheless, so close to us. It's the period when the first cracks in an apparently perfect egalitarian world started to appear. Robbing a bank with guns in a communist country is like robbing a supermarket of its toilette paper. Money then and there was useless unless you could justify its origin. And that is what makes this story so strange for us. But there are many, many other layers to the story. The cast is great. The historical background is fascinating (at least for us, Romanians). And the cinematography is far above average. This movie was like a breath of fresh air. One full of poisonous gases, as seeing the movie, you will discover that there are many things about the human race that will upset you, but at the same time, air that provokes an uncontrollable laugh. Some people in the audience didn't appreciate the jokes. I did, because I considered it was the only way not to make the most depressing movie in the world. A masterpiece that will most probably be considered as such many years from now, when people will start making movies about our not so egalitarian society.

You've probably never heard of the Ioanid Gang, or the bank robbery that they carried out in Bucharest in 1959. I had never heard of it before I watched Nae Caranfil's "Closer to the Moon". The movie isn't any kind of masterpiece, but sufficiently looks at this incident, and how Romania's Soviet-backed government arrested the gang and forced them to star in a propaganda film reenacting the robbery.

One of the thing that we notice while watching the movie is the hypocrisy of the Eastern Bloc governments. They claimed that they were establishing classless societies but there was a high society (and the people in the government had no qualms about themselves jewelry). Later on, Nicolae Ceaușescu forced women to have as many children as possible, which overfilled Romania's orphanages. Most of the heads of state in the Eastern Bloc were typical ideologues, but Ceaușescu sounded like a mental case.

Anyway, the movie's worth seeing.

Vera Farmiga and Mark Strong played Romanian Jewish Communists who along with three others plot to rob the Romanian State Bank, a crime punishable by death. The court and country decide to use the case to teach a lesson in propaganda film. The burglars are acting as themselves in this film. The burglary was more about robbing the bank but anti-Communist. There is a nice romance in the film as well. Vera Farmiga and Mark Strong gave the best performances in the film. I would have liked to know more about it. The film was shot on location abroad.