Notizie

Romanian cinema at 58th San Sebastian Festival will be represented by Principles of Life (Principii de viață). Constantin Popescu's sophomore feature has been selected to compete in the Zabaltegi-New Directors Section. The film examines the rapport between father and son, and in a nutshell is about the generation gaps and the inability to communicate. Emilian Velicanu, 43, considers his life positively full: he has money, a new villa, he is married for the second time to a young woman with whom he has a baby and has a son from his first marriage. Before the holidays arrive, he makes plans to leave his business on autopilot during his time off, but complications ensue, and this end of the day crisis makes him wonder if he's really happy and fulfilled. The screenplay for Principles of Life has had a story of its own. It failed to win at a previous edition...

New waves come and new waves go, but they can also linger on in the careers of filmmakeres as they spiral out and become individuals. The Romanian New Wave that began to break only five or so years ago seems to have already dissipated -- only Corneliu Porumboiu's "Police, Adjective" has emerged in the last two years. Maybe the Romanian vibe itself was just too dire to last, or maybe the economy kneecapped the movement. Perhaps momentum was lost when one of the Wave's most vibrant and commercially orthodox voices, Cristian Nemescu, died in a car wreck in 2006, forever 27, amidst the post-production on his first feature, "California Dreamin'" (2007), which itself has taken three arduous years to finally be made available to American viewers.

The Romanian films we've seen in the last five years were all made by thirtysomethings, all of them still teenagers and film-school students when Romania became...