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Winner of the Palme d’Or in 2007 field for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and double prize take in 2012 for Beyond the Hills, Cristian Mungiu has only premiered his films in Cannes. In 2002, he presented Occident in the Directors’ Fortnight and had saw thew short film omnibus Tales From the Golden Age be presented in the Un Certain Regard section in 2009. His last film Graduation (Bacalaureat) was a comp selection in 2016, so this about seven years between productions. Featuring some alumni from films past, R.M.N. is his fourth film selected in competition.…...

Deal struck ahead of film’s world premiere in Cannes competition

IFC Films has acquired North American rights to Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu’s R.M.N. from Wild Bunch International ahead of its premiere in competition at Cannes.

The acquisition marks the fifth time IFC Films and Mungiu have partnered on distribution. IFC picked up rights to 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days in 2007, and has worked with Mungiu on his subsequent films Tales From The Golden Age, Beyond The Hills and Graduation.

R.M.N. is produced by Cristian Mungiu with Mobra Films and executive produced by Tudor Reu.

IFC Films has acquired North American rights to “R.M.N.,” the new film from acclaimed writer, director and producer Cristian Mungiu, ahead of its world premiere in Cannes this week.

It’s a grand reunion for the indie studio and the director, marking their fifth distribution collaboration. IFC Films will release “R.M.N.” theatrically in 2022. It may have been a wise preemptive buy. The director’s films tend to get an award-winning reception in the South of France. Mungiu previously won the Palme d’Or in 2007 for “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a drama about abortion that was set in waning days of the Nicolae Ceaușescu era in Romania.

Here’s the official description of “R.M.N.”: “A few days before Christmas, having quit his job in Germany, Matthias (Marin Grigore) returns to his multi-ethnic Transylvanian village. He wishes to involve himself more in the education of his son,...

What better way to kick off a new month than a look at the many movies coming to Hulu? Ok, if you don’t have a Hulu subscription you might need an alternative. Maybe this list will convince you to take one out, though (not that I’m there salesperson). But enough patter, let’s crack on with it.

Here’s every new film that arrived on July 1st:

12 and Holding (2006)

2001 Maniacs (2005)

52 Pick-Up (1986)

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

A Complete History of My Sexual Failures (2009)

A Kid Like Jake (2018)

A Mighty Wind (2003)

A Storks Journey (2017)

An Eye for a Eye (1966)

The Axe Murders of Villisca (2017)

The Bellboy (1960)

Beloved (2012)

Best In Show (2000)

Between Us (2017)

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

Birdwatchers (2010)

Boogie Woogie (2010)

The Bounty (1984)

Brokedown Palace (1998)

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (1992)

Bug (1975)

Buried (2010)

Cadaver (2009)

California Dreamin’ (2009)

Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)

Catcher Was A Spy (2018)

The Catechism Cataclysm (2011)

Change of Plans (2010)

Cheech & Chong...

“Ten Years Thailand” an anthology of shorts by Thai directors Aditya Assarat, Wisit Sasanatieng, Chulayarnnon Siriphol and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, imagines what happens to their country, ruled by a military junta since 2014, a decade from now. Opening with George Orwell’s famous line in “1984”: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” a common theme in the anthology is mind control for the purpose of producing homogeneity. Drolly absurdist, but only average in inventiveness, and lacking the truly pungent satirical wit of a similar dystopian omnibus like “Tales From the Golden Age,” these vignettes will nonetheless make the rounds at plenty of festivals thanks to the cache of 2010 Palme d’Or winner Weerasethakul.

The Thai, Hong Kong and Japanese co-production is spearheaded by the producers and sales agents of Hong Kong omnibus “Ten Years,” whose dystopian vision of post-handover Hong Kong was banned in...

Peppered with items that recently dropped at Rotterdam and Berlin, with a handful of world premieres to bout, the International Narrative Comp features Gabriela Pichler‘s sophomore comedy Amateurs, Tales from the Golden Age‘s Ioana Uricaru feature debut (which filmed in Montreal last summer) in Lemonade, and irreverent to the docu-form The Ambassador‘s Mads Brugger makes his fiction debut with The Saint Bernard Syndicate.

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Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Justin Chon's Korean American drama Gook and Pororoca, the latest from Romanian auteur Constantin Popescu (Tales from the Golden Age) are among the titles selected for competition at this year's Zurich International Film Festival.

The Zurich line-up, announced Wednesday, is a compelling mix of U.S. and international arthouse titles, with highlights including Peter Mackie Burns' Daphne starring Emily Beecham; Venice Film Festival entry Under The Tree from Icelandic helmer Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson and Weightless, the feature debut of music video director Jaron Albertin, which stars Marc Menchaca, Julianna Nicholson and Johnny Knoxville.

In...

Family Photos

Director: Cristian Mungiu

Writer: Cristian Mungiu

It’s already been four years since Romanian auteur’s last film, the superb Beyond the Hills in 2012—and that’s the only other feature he’s completed since winning his 2007 Palme d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (though he did contribute to the 2009 omnibus Tales from the Golden Age). Filming wrapped in July for his latest film, Family Photos, a family drama about parenting set in a small Romanian town. Of note, it’s Mungiu’s first feature to revolve around a male protagonist.

Cast: Vlad Ivanov, Adrian Titieni, Lia Bugnar, Ioachim Ciobanu

Production Co./Producers: Mobra Films, Why Not Production, Wild Bunch, Les Films du Fleuve, France 3 Cinema, Mandragora

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available. Wild Bunch (domestic/international)

Release Date: Mungiu seems a sure bet for Cannes 2016 main competition.

The Doha Film Institute’s new Qumra event kicks off today in Doha, with a focus on mentoring emerging filmmakers.

The programme includes industry-focused masterclasses from Gael Garcia Bernal, Cristian Mungiu, Abderrahamane Sissako, Danis Tanovic and Elia Suleiman (who also serves as the event’s artistic advisor). Suleiman’s masterclass replaces a planned talk with Leila Hatami, who had to cancel her trip to Doha.

More than 100 international industry attendees are connecting with delegates from 29 projects at various stages of production (all of the projects have backing in part from Dfi).

Attending industry – to name just a few — include Toronto’s Cameron Bailey, Wild Bunch’s Vincent Maravel, Image Nation Abu Dhabi’s Tala Al Asmani, Gulf Film’s Selim El Azar, Urban Distribution’s Frederic Corvez, the Danish Film Institute’s Henrik Bo Nielsen, Cannes Critics’ Week’s Remi Bonhomme, script consultant Claire Dobbin, Locarno’s Nadia Dresti, Busan’s Kim Ji-Seok, filmmaker [link=nm...

Screen previews the Sarajevo Film Festival’s industry events, which includes a UK focus, the annual Regional Forum and highlights of the Work in Progress and CineLink projects.

Over the last ten years, Southeast Europe’s most important film event Sarajevo Film Festival has also become its main industry hub.

What started in 2003 with CineLink, a co-production market initially modeled after Rotterdam’s CineMart, has developed into an increasingly wide array of industry events, simultaneously expanding from the region towards Caucasus countries, and in recent years aiming to spread its activities and networking overseas, in partnerships with the Doha Film Institute, the Arab Fund for Arts & Culture, and from this year, Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (Imcine).

While the Industry Days peak in the final part of the festival, from August 20-23, its activities started on Sunday [17], with the presentation of the newly established Sarajevo City of Film Fund.

In addition to CineLink, the heart of...

New projects from Kutlug Ataman, Bogdan Mustata, Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross among the 14 titles.

The Turkish film industry, buoyed by the Palme d’Or win for Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, dominates Sarajevo Film Festival’s upcoming co-production market, CineLink (Aug 20-23).

The selection committee has shortlisted a total of 14 projects from over 200 submissions from 18 countries across South-Eastern Europe. These have been split between the CineLink and CineLink Plus sections.

Turkey has four projects across the two strands included Hilal, Feza And Other Planets by Kutlug Ataman (The Lamb) and producer Emre Yeksan’s directing debut The Gulf.

Romania has three projects including In Between by Bogdan Mustata (last year in Sff competition with Wolf) and Lemonade, produced by Cristian Mungiu and directed by Ioana Uricaru (Tales From The Golden Age).

Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross, who directed 2012 festival hit In Bloom,will present their new project My Happy Family.

Additional titles...

Faulty Blueprint: Rugina’s Debut Pleasures the Crowd, Numbs the Mind

A certifiable hit at the Romanian box office, Iulia Rugina’s directorial debut, Love Building has the formulaic, crowd pleasing prowess of similar Western counterparts where hokey endeavors are piled one on top of another until, instead of revealing its own realistic mess, we reach a staunchly uplifting and/or hopelessly trite finale. To her credit, Rugina doesn’t completely dissolve her narrative in saccharine fantasyland by ending on an open-ended sequence that doesn’t quite put the ribbon on the wrapped box, but neither is it operating as anything other than simplistic fluff. While it doesn’t neatly solve the many problems of its many characters, the film also fails to question its own complicity in these types of problems, namely that maybe our conditioned, heteronormative notions of love and successfully realistic relationships is the root of discord.

Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d'Or for his brilliantly agonising film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. He talks here about his new film Beyond the Hills, and why he thinks Romania should build more cinemas and fewer churches

In the spring of 2005, a novice nun at a remote convent in north-eastern Romania heard (or thought she heard) the Devil's voice inside her head. The convent priest's solution was to perform an exorcism. He ordered 23-year-old Maricica Irina Cornici to be bound to a cross and gagged with a towel. Then he left her alone in a damp, dark room until the cure could take effect. She died three days later of suffocation and dehydration.

The Cornici case is the true-life phantom in the wings of Beyond the Hills, an exacting, disturbing new drama from Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. A prizewinner at last year's Cannes film festival, the film lifts the lid...

Though it took some time (and a stopover for an omnibus titled “Tales from the Golden Age”), Romanian auteur and Palm d’or recipient Cristian Mungiu has finally returned with a new full length film, “Beyond The Hills,” another penetrating, finespun narrative that took both Best Screenplay and Best Actress awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Here, the director starts off with a true story: Voichiţa (Cosmina Stratan) and Alina (Cristina Flutur) spent their childhood together in an orphanage before the two went their separate ways, the former becoming a nun in rural Romania and the other working odd-jobs in Germany. After years apart, the two decide to meet and it’s soon revealed, very subtly, that they had more than just a close friendship. But Voichiţa is supremely dedicated to her faith, and when she refuses a plan to leave the convent for Germany, Alina does all...

A pair of titles in our Most Anticipated Films for 2012 in #39. Andrew Dosunmu (Ma George) and #30. Mark Jackson (Untitled Sicily Project) are two of the lucky fifteen filmmakers to have received coin in the shape of 2012 Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute grants. Recipients include a trio of titles that we caught in Park City back in January in Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, Ira Sach’s Keep the Lights On, and Destin Daniel Cretton’s I Am Not a Hipster. Here’s the press release.

Post-Production Feature Film Grants

Keep the Lights On

Writer/director: Ira Sachs

The story of a tumultuous, decade-long relationship between two men in New York City. Keep the Lights On premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Ira Sachs is a writer and director based in New York City. His films include Married Life (2007), The Delta (1997) and the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-winning Forty Shades of Blue.

Once again, it appears as if we’ll be associating the name of Cristian Mungiu with the Palme d’Or. By the looks of how the trades, critical mass and the results of our critics’ panel, the major contender to break out in the fest during week one of the fest is indeed Beyond the Hills. Set in a monastery, is tells the tale of how one person’s former love has no chances in competing with a higher love. Starring Cosmina Stratan, Cristina Flutur and Valeriu Andriuta, this Romanian-France co-production (Why Not Prod. and Dardenne Bros.’ Les Films du Fleuve) which clocks in at over two and a half hours is being mentioned along with the golden 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days. This is Mungiu’s fourth feature, first since Tales from the Golden Age. Click to enlarge!

It's been a long five years since "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days." The Cristian Mungiu-directed drama took the Cannes Film Festival by storm in 2007, winning the coveted Palme d'Or prize and the Fipresci Award and essentially ushered in the Romanian New Wave (which depending on who you are, may or may not have lived up to its promise). While Mungiu did contribute to the 2009 Romanian omnibus picture "Tales from the Golden Age," a proper feature-length follow-up hasn't materialized. Until now. According to Deadline, Mungiu has an untitled genre picture in the works that's set in an Orthodox convent in Romania, and centers on a young woman’s descent into madness, her subsequent exorcism and the police investigation it sparks. There was once a Mungiu follow-up project called "Temporary," and it's unclear if they are the same picture (doubtful), but a little digging reveals this genre picture was once called...

#12. Provizoriu Director/Writer: Cristian MungiuProducers: Mungiu's Mobra Films which he runs with Hanno Hoefer and Oleg Mutu along with Why Not Films (who produced his last pair) and Dardenne Bros.' Les Films du Fleuve.Distributor: Rights Available The Gist: Direct translation of the title is "provisionally". This is a Romanian convent-set tale of a 23-year-old girl's overweening love for a girl inmate....(more) Cast: None announced yet - we imagine two young Romanian actresses. List Worthy Reasons...: Unlike the folks at the Academy, Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days hit us like a ton of bricks and 2009's barely noticed Tales from the Golden Age was a welcome side project (five Romania filmmakers contributed to five Pov's of Romanian rural life). Mungiu's third feature film (his debut was 2002's Occident) should be up our alley if it holds some of the strong dramatic core that we associate with this helmer.

The week before the beast known as Sundance gets unleashed, 12 projects and their writers/directors will hit the Sundance Resort in Utah and get to work with such names as Lisa Cholodenko, Nicole Holofcener and Joachim Trier on what they hope will one day become feature film projects. This year appears to have more stories that go beyond U.S. borders and worth noting several of the mentioned lab attendees have a bit more "clout". Among the dozen, we have helmer Jonas Carpignano who'll be basing his feature on his award-winning short, A Chjàna (which won at the Venice Film Festival, we've got Ioana Uricaru (one of the filmmaker contributors on Cristian Mungiu's Tales From the Golden Age) who'll work from a U.S./Romanian perspective. David Lowery who was featured in Filmmaker Mag's 25 New Faces of Independent Film of 2011, who I think has a legitimate shot at attracting...

by Steve Dollar

Cinephiles scoping for the next new wave to surf discovered a tidal surge in the past decade, as a new generation of Romanian filmmakers—who came of age during the waning years of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s corrupt and withering regime—began to give that era its own, idiosyncratic narrative. Directors such as Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest) and Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), with varying degrees of mordant humor, created vivid, absurdist anatomies of that terminal phase of what official jargon called “the golden age.” If previous “waves” of Eastern European cinema favored the surreal or the allegorical as a way to say what was not allowed to be said, these artists who emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc parlayed at once a perverse nostalgia for the bad old days and the...

Vera Farmiga's Higher Ground "admirably tries, on a minuscule budget, to evoke the spirit of American cinema from 35 years ago: the age of Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, an era much more hospitable to serious roles for women than the current one." Melissa Anderson in the Voice: "As reported in a New York Times Magazine cover story on the actress in 2006 (three years before her Oscar-nominated performance in Up in the Air), Farmiga has expressed her disgust with the roles offered her by setting scripts on fire: 'I stack up all those crass female characters, all those utterly ordinary women, all those hundreds and hundreds of parts that have no substance or meaning and turn them into a blazing pyre.' It's a shame, then, that Higher Ground never really ignites."

Farmiga plays "Corinne, a Midwest rural woman who embraces a hippie-inflected but paternalistic evangelical community with her high...

We have an exclusive clip from the upcoming anthology Tales from the Golden Age, which will be released in theaters and VOD platforms including SundanceNow on August 17. Click below to watch this exclusive clip from the drama which delves into the final years of Romania's Ceausescu empire.

Click to watch Exclusive: The Legend of The Greedy Policeman!

The final 15 years of the Ceausescu regime were the worst in Romania's history. Nonetheless, the propaganda machine of that time referred without fail to that period as "the golden age"...

Tales from the Golden Age adapts for screen the most popular urban myths of the period. Comic, bizarre, surprising myths abounded, myths that drew on the often surreal events of everyday life under the communist regime. Humor is what kept Romanians alive, and Tales from a Golden Age aims to re-capture that mood, portraying the survival of a nation having to face every...

John Curran’s Stone and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go have recently been released on DVD, so it is time to take a listen back at episode #236 of Sos radio. Enjoy.

We’re catching up with new stuff in general release and new on DVD in this week’s random round-up: first up is Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, which has been kicking around long enough for us to get into spoiler territory, so be warned. We’ll also talk about John Curran’s Stone, featuring Robert De Niro, Edward Norton and Milla Jovovich, as well as Tales From the Golden Age, the Romanian export from Cristian Mungiu, the writer-director behind Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.

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Belle and Sebastian – Write About Love (ft. Carey Mulligan) / Come On Sister / I Want the World to Stop...

Tales From The Golden Age

Starring Diana Cavallioti, Radu Iacoban, Vlad Ivanov

Writer Cristian Mungiu

Romanian w/English subtitles

Think living in a Post- Bush, post Iraq economy is bad? Then try a light and airy peek into life under the Iron Curtain circa the 1980’s, in the Romanian film, Tales From The Golden Age, told in vignettes as light and airily made as food rationing, near starvation and government censorship can get. The title is taken from the moniker with which the nation’s communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu dubbed Romania under his leadership. While you can’t blame your ordinary, beleagured dictator for wanting to put a positive spin on things, the title The Golden Age is ripe for a clever, light-handed writer like Cristian Mungiu to go to town with a charmingly absurdist take on the vagaries of trying to make it without capitalism.

Romania.s Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauºescu ran a tight ship from 1965 . 1989. He created a police state and an environment of fear, imposed stiff laws and penalties that eventually caused 2 million political assassinations and threw the country into poverty. Ceauºescu was eventually executed in the rebellion of 1989. Filmmaker Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days) looks back at the old Ceauºescu days in his film Tales from the Golden Age, an ironic title, considering how bad they were. Mungiu tells Monsters & Critics this is the first comedy about that terrible period. M&C - The Ceauºescu regime lasted almost 25 years, despite its internationally acknowledged brutality. How did it last so long? Cristian...

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...

Cineuropa have produced a deluge of other probable titles that neither Ioncinema.com, nor Screen Daily or for that matter any other trades have mentioned in their predictions lists for the biggie festival next May. I think some of the names/titles aren't better than pure specuIation, but are informed guesses. - Cineuropa have produced a deluge of other probable titles that neither Ioncinema.com, nor Screen Daily or for that matter any other trades have mentioned in their predictions lists for the biggie festival next May. I think some of the names/titles aren't better than pure specuIation, but are informed guesses. Worth noting, I hadn't placed Olivier Assayas’s Carlos or Godard’s Socialism on my original list since they were both supposed to receive some form of a release prior to the fest and for obvious reasons, they are both strong contenders. Here are eight...

This year I've decided to not include titles that were introduced in 2009 and are having their theatrical release this year: they include top of the list we find A Prophet and Fish Tank, a pair of cream of the crop titles showcased in Cannes, and films such as Dogtooth, Hadewijch, Tales From the Golden Age, Father of My Children, City of Life and Death, I Killed My Mother (J'ai tue ma mere), Mother, Mother and Child, Lebanon, Micmacs à tire-larigot are all worthy titles to look out for. - Welcome to the official landing page for where the 2010's top 100 most anticipated list begins. Now in year three, I started putting the list together in an attempt to keep tabs on the projects that matter the most to the site – it acts on some occasions as an F-u to the year in film previews that fail to include important...

Sin Nombre

DVD & Blu-ray, Revolver

Sayra, a teenage Honduran girl, sets off with her father and uncle for New Jersey, hitching an illegal ride on a slow freight train winding its way through Mexico. Their journey, full of picaresque adventures and dangerous obstacles would be enough of a tale for any film but this one raises the stakes considerably by intertwining it with the story of a disillusioned gang member, Willy, on the run from his one-time criminal cohorts. It's the kind of gang where they cover their faces with tattoos to look scary, and chop up their enemies and feed them to dogs to actually be scary. Willy's tale adds a great deal of tension and suspense without turning the social commentary aspect of the film into a farce. This is a world rarely visited in the movies, certainly not one we see presented so honestly. It's a road movie – or,...

It was Cristian Mungiu who first introduced us to the clinic cold Vlad Ivanov in 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days -- perhaps the role that convinced other filmmakers to cast the Romanian actor in his expanded repertoire of other films (The Concert, Police, Adjective and The Whistleblower). The two paired together in Mungiu's Tales From the Golden Age - oddly, I'm not entirely sure if Mungiu actually directed the actor - as the portmanteau film doesn't specify who directed what or who directed The Legend of the Chicken Driver. - What do pairings such as Sigourney Weaver and James Cameron, Catherine Keener and Spike Jonze, and Guy Pearce and John Hillcoat all have in common? These are working director-actor relationships that resurfaced in 2009. I've always been a fan of this fermentation process that spans over the course of two or more films – it often produces some fine results and some...

Constantin Popescu is currently shooting and is close to wrapping up his feature length directorial debut with a familiar face in some award winning samples of Romanian cinema in the lead role. - Constantin Popescu is currently shooting and is close to wrapping up his feature length directorial debut with a familiar face in some award winning samples of Romanian cinema in the lead role. Written by Razvan Radulescu and Alexandru Baciu (The Paper Will Be Blue), this is a contemporary, drama set during a 24-hour period that features a father played by Vlad Ivanov who is disconnected from his family, especially from his son. Filmneweurope reports that Principles of Life has picked up a good number of grants and is being lensed by California Dreamin's Liviu Marghidan.  Among the five directors who participated in Tales from the Golden Age, the omnibus project devised by Cristian Mungiu...

A half-dozen filmmakers will be setting up shop at The Résidence de la Cinéfondation...and of the six, we have South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus who showed up at Tiff with Shirley Adams and Ioana Uricaru, one of the filmmakers who participated on Cristian Mungiu's Tales From the Golden Age. - A half-dozen filmmakers will be setting up shop at The Résidence de la Cinéfondation...and of the six, we have South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus who showed up at Tiff with Shirley Adams and Ioana Uricaru, one of the filmmakers who participated on Cristian Mungiu's Tales From the Golden Age. Mungiu and Ioana Uricaru most recently wrote the script for Outskirts for helmer Bogdan Apetri and Hermanus might want to consider a title change for his project (Two Lovers), since it was recently used by James Gray. Of all the film scripts that were workshopped at the Residence,...

Canada's most avant-garde film festival have released their entire slate for their 38th edition. Apart from Lee Daniel's pegged for Oscar - Precious, Lone Scherfig's An Education, Lars von Trier's Antichrist and Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces (Los abrasos rotos), this year's edition is filled to the gills with obscure titles and names that even a hardcore connoisseur of world cinema such as myself is unfamiliar with. - I've just completed an exhaustive 35 film slate at Tiff and I've got very little time to recharge the batteries for The Festival du nouveau cinéma. Canada's most avant-garde film festival have released their entire slate for their 38th edition. Apart from Lee Daniel's pegged for Oscar - Precious, Lone Scherfig's An Education, Lars von Trier's Antichrist and Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces (Los abrasos rotos), this year's edition is filled to the...

• If you're a distributor keen on foreign language fair, developing relationships with filmmakers is primordial in having an advantage on the competition: this is a tactic that IFC films regularly employs with foreign filmmakers (several come to mind as I write this). Despite receiving inadequate support for a foreign language nomination for the Oscars, the above mentioned relationship is one reason why IFC Films have been able to grab Cristian Mungiu and fellow Romanian filmmakers (Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Hofer, Razvan Marculescu and Constantin Popescu) latest project titled Tales From the Golden Age. Unlike IFC folks, I'll be seeing the Un Certain Regard selected film this Thursday, and if I haven't declared often enough on the site – I'm a huge fan of Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (it received tons of accolades and last year's Palme d'or). I got to interview Mungiu at Tiff. Tales From The Golden Age is

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Cannes -- IFC is again heading to Romania, acquiring U.S. rights to "Tales From the Golden Age," a feature collection of shorts set in the country's Communist period.

"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" writer-director Cristian Mungiu penned all the shorts while he, and fellow Romanian helmers Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Hofer, Razvan Marculescu and Constantin Popescu each took a turn directing one.

The pic, which premieres Tuesday in Un Certain Regard at the Festival de Cannes, examines urban legends in the former Eastern bloc nation, examining life in those dark days through the experiences of ordinary people. The stories are not related but are united "by mood, narrative pattern and the details of the historical period," IFC said.

At Cannes two years ago, IFC bought Mungiu's "4 Months," a hard-bitten tale of a young girl's attempted abortion in Ceausescu's Romania; the film took the Palme d'Or and became a critics' darling when...

• France-based Wild Bunch are the masters of their domain – we can forget about the horrible way Che fell victim to a bad market by remembering the success story of The Wrestler. They come to Cannes as usual with a ton of items in competition and a slate of films that gives buyers way too many options. I'll be checking out Cristian Mungiu's Tales From the Golden Age, Gabe Ibanez's Hierro, Looking for Eric by Ken Loach, the probably banned from filmmaking in China again director Lou Ye's Spring Fever, the already controversial (will it be ready on time?) Enter the Void by Gasper Noe and I will hope to fit in Marina De Van's thriller Don't Look Back and Un Certain Regard selected No One Knows About Persan Cats from Iranian filmmaker Bahmann Ghobadi. Wild Bunch also have some savoury titles in post production which I expect

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• To be more precise, the Un Certain Regard's entry of Tales From the Golden Age is a film by Cristian Mungiu and filmmakers Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu and Constantin Popescu. I'm not sure which images (below) correspond to which film/filmmaker, but what Mungiu wants to do is provide a balance to the point of view he offered in the grim portrait 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Mungiu told me that the short film project that looks back at the small misfortunes common Romanian folk had under communism will told on a much lighter note. Judging by the pics below, I'm expecting a couple of hilarious sequences. ...

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• So the inflatable doll magically coming to life tale was perhaps too “out there” for a main comp acceptance, but Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll came on over to Un Certain Regard section along with expect works from Romanian filmmakers Cristian Mungiu (Tales From The Golden Age) and Corneliu Porumboiu (Police, Adjective), France's Denis Dercourt (Demain Des L'aube), Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Nymph) and Cannes regular (The Host, Tokyo!) Bong Joon-Ho and his latest film, Mother. Lee Daniels' Sundance fave is going to Cannes with a buzz worthy, shorter titled Push – this great news explains why the film was pulled out of the New Directors/New Films 2009 fest. Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi who gave us the devastating Turtles Can Fly a couple of year back comes to the Ucr section with another oddly titled film in Nobody Knows About The Persian Cats. And speaking of Sundance, Cannes' own Atelier de

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• It's no big secret that Cristian Mungiu's next project was Cannes bound, yesterday's brief update Palme d’Or winner Mungiu is re-teaming with sales agent Wild Bunch for Tales From The Golden Age is a great indication that the "unconventional personal history of the late communist period in Romania told in six independent, yet sometimes connected, stories by native directors" will show up on the Croisette in a couple of months from now. When I interviewed the filmmaker [Sept.2007] he was in-between promoting 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days and in the middle of "Tales". "I wanted to make a series of short films pasted together based on the late communist times to talk about the system through the small misfortunes in daily life. Finally I discovered at some point that it was too funny as a project and for some people it might come across as a funny way that

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