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Exclusive: Dekanalog has picked up North American rights to the Sarajevo competition title Men of Deeds, the latest feature from Romanian filmmaker Paul Negoescu.

Men of Deeds played Making Waves, NYC’s annual festival dedicated to showcasing contemporary Romanian contemporary cinema, on April 2nd, with Negoescu and his Director of Photography Ana Drăghici in attendance. Dekanalog will release the film later in the year.

The film is up for 10 Romanian Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Screenplay. The story follows Ilie, a village policeman who enjoys an easy life. His passivity during a series of violent events soon turns him into an accomplice to murder. Tension accumulates in the village, forcing Ilie to make a final decision.

The official film synopsis reads: A middle-aged police chief goes on with his job and modest life in a small town, dreaming of having an orchard, managing regular...

Having failed to cut it in the city, mild-mannered Romanian cop Ilie takes a lower-pressure job as a police chief in a rural village near the Moldovan border. Expecting a quieter, easier life of mostly benign duties, he instead encounters even more violence and moral rot than he did before. That he’s surprised suggests Ilie (played by Iulian Postelnicu with a permanent woebegone grimace) hasn’t spent much time watching his own country’s cinema. An exceedingly mordant comedy that gradually bleeds out to tragedy, Paul Negoescu’s “Men of Deeds” is another Romanian exercise in finding personal and institutional corruption under every upturned stone, behind every unlocked small-town door, in every heavily conditional handshake. Audiences won’t be nearly as startled, but it’s bleakly compelling all the same.

Back in 2016, Negoescu scored a major homegrown hit in Romania with his jaunty, shambolic crowdpleaser “Two Lottery Tickets,” a...

Paul Negoescu’s fourth feature, “Men of Deeds,” which world premieres in competition Sunday at the Sarajevo Film Festival, is at first glance a departure from the Romanian director’s previous work. Set in the rural region of Bucovina, it’s a world removed from the swanky bars and bistros of his last film, the Bucharest-set “The Story of a Summer Lover.”

The film follows llie (Iulian Postelnicu), a small-town police chief who hopes to settle into a modest, comfortable life. A man of low expectations and dubious morals, he sets his sights on a small plot of land that’s up for sale — an orchard in the countryside where he imagines he can make a fresh start.

Nothing, however, goes according to plan. Before long Ilie is being thwarted by bad choices and haunted by past misdeeds, leading to an inevitable reckoning after a series of violent events compels...

Paul Negoescu directs story of a village policeman caught up in violent events.

Screen can reveal the first trailer for Paul Negoescu’s Romanian police drama Men Of Deeds, ahead of the film’s world premiere in competition at Sarajevo Film Festival this month.

German firm Patra Spanou is handling sales on the title, which follows a village policeman in his late thirties, who is put in a dark place by his past choices and a chain of violent events.

It is Romanian filmmaker Negoescu’s fourth feature, but the first time he has directed from a script by another...

Boutique German sales agent Patra Spanou Film has acquired international sales rights to “Men of Deeds,” the fourth feature by Romanian director Paul Negoescu (“Two Lottery Tickets”), which will be presented in a closed screening for industry guests on June 24 at the Transilvania Film Festival.

The film tells the story of llie (Iulian Postelnicu), a small-town police chief who wants to build a modest, comfortable life for himself but makes all the wrong choices. Middle-aged and alienated, he feels the need to be a part of something – to build an orchard, even a home. But his past combines with a series of violent events to push him toward a dark place, where he’s desperate to find solutions in his search for justice.

“Men of Deeds” is produced by Anamaria Antoci and co-produced by Poli Angelova. Production companies are Papillon Film, Tangaj Production, Screening Emotions and Avanpost Production.

Negoescu said...

The feature, starring Iulian Postelnicu, will start production in May in Romania’s northernmost county. After debuting with A Month in Thailand in 2012, directing one of his country’s very few domestic hits, Two Lottery Tickets, in 2016 and releasing The Story of a Summer Lover in 2018, Romanian director Paul Negoescu is ready to start production on his fourth feature, Men of Deeds (working title). The project is being staged by Negoescu’s Papillon Film in co-production with Tangaj Production, represented by Anamaria Antoci, Screening Emotions and Avanpost Production (Romania). The screenplay, written by Radu Romaniuc and Oana Tudor, focuses on Ilie, the forty-something chief of police in a village in Northern Romania, close to the Ukrainian border. Surrounded by illegalities (for example, both the mayor and the...

France-Finland co-production A Girl’s Room takes €20,000 Eurimages Co-Production Development Award.

The 2018 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival has named the winners of its Industry@Tallinn & Baltic Event awards after a week of presentations and meetings.

More than 400 delegates attended this year’s event.

In the festival’s Baltic Event Co-Production Market, which featured 16 projects, France-Finland feature A Girl’s Room, from director Aino Suni and producers Sébastien Aubert and Ulla Simonen, won the €20,000 Eurimages Co-Production Development Award.

The Cannes Marché du Film Producers’ Network Award, which comes with free accreditations to next year’s edition of Cannes, went to...

Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Russian drama Ayka wins best film.

Russian director Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Ayka, about a young woman attemping to survive after abandoning her baby in Moscow, was the big winner at Germany’s Filmfestival Cottbus (Nov 6-11), taking home the best film prize in the feature competition as well as prize of the ecumenical jury.

Ayka, which is Dvortsevoy’s second feature, premiered in competition at Cannes earlier this year and is Kazakhstan’s entry for the best foreign- language film Oscar category. The Match Factory is handling international sales.

Russian films regularly garner the main prize in...

With his third feature, rising Romanian director Paul Negoescu reaches back to a time when Woody Allen’s name was associated with intelligent romantic comedies and jazz, delivering a film drenched in Allen-esque situations replanted in Bucharest. That in itself is fine, yet while “The Story of a Summer Lover” is intended as an homage to those classic films, down to the use of music and specific urban settings, Negoescu lacks the ability to make his schlubby characters interesting.

Instead, this overly chatty story of a math professor who finds more satisfaction sleeping with nubile students than with his girlfriend merely hauls out yet another bunch of unexceptional navel-gazing characters whose physical and intellectual attractions will escape most audiences’ comprehension. It’s good to see Romanian cinema continuing to diversify, but this isn’t quite the thinking man’s comedy it very much wants to be.

The triumvirate of friends...