Romanians at Cannes

Cristian Mungiu, the Romanian director decorated by the French minister of culture with the Order of Arts and Letters in rank of Officer, sat on the jury panel at Cannes, presided by Steven Spielberg.

Corina Sabău, 31.05.2013, 20:16

Two Romanian short films, “Shadow of a Cloud”, by Radu Jude, and “In the Fishtank”, by Tudor Cristian Jurgiu, were presented under the Quinzaine des Realisateurs’ and the Cinefondation sections.

Radu Jude’s “Shadow of a Cloud” tells the story of a priest, played by theater director Alexandru Dabija. The priest is called on a sweltering summer day to give the last rites to a dying woman. Jude said about the movie: “One may find many meanings in this movie. Maybe the most important is expressed in a fragment of the prayer uttered by the main character — ‘my unworthy life passed like sleep, like the shadow of a cloud’ “.

Florin Lazarescu and Radu Jude wrote the script while Marius Panduru was director of photography. Just as in his previous work, the director does not shun putting his characters in extreme situations, or even ridiculing them.

“There is something inside me pushing me to see things like this. Chekhov summarized this situation best. One character in Uncle Vanya said: ‘For a long time I believed that the destiny of man is tragic, but in the end I discovered that in fact his destiny is to be ridiculous’. And there is something funny in the way people relate to themselves and their problems, which does not rule out sadness or suffering. As far as I’m concerned this is the angle that interests me. When sadness, unhappiness and drama mix so much that you can’t identify them with the ridiculous any longer.”

Radu Jude went on to say about his existence as a filmmaker: “I wish for a cinema that is as impure as possible. I see an evolution or an involution in myself: when I started to make my first movies I had a great wish to be stylistically coherent. I wanted to have a sort of self-awareness in how I was filming. Little by little, it seems to me that this kind of coherence leads to a kind of block of energies which can open the film towards new directions, and on the other hand putting the emphasis in places where it shouldn’t be.”

He also told us why he picked theater director Alexandru Dabija to play the main character in “Shadow of a Cloud”: “That is because it seemed to me, before meeting him in person, that he has a very complex inner world, which comes out in his face, in the way he speaks. I wanted very much for the main character to have a rich inner world, to be a man asking himself questions, a man rankled by the relationship with the world and the meaning of life. I believe that all these things come through on Alexandru Dabija’s face, who is not only a great theater director, he is also a very good actor. Working with him I also discovered a human being that is equally extraordinary.”

Shadow of a Cloud had its world premiere on May 23rd at the Theatre Croisette, with the director, the producer and the actors attending.

Before getting to Cannes, the short film “In the Fistank” by Tudor Jurgiu was presented at the NexT International Short and Medium Length Film Festival in Bucharest in April. George and Cristina are trying to break up, but do not seem to be managing to do so.

This is the story of how the movie came about, as told by Tudor Jurgiu: “The story started from several other stories gathered along several years. I gathered a few stories about relationship problems. I didn’t know precisely what I wanted to do with them, but they were interesting stories and at some point, after I gathered all this material, I found some constant lines. For instance, in many of these couples, people made up, broke up, made up again and broke up again. I tried to build this story around this narrative core: a couple going through just that, but condensed in twenty minutes.”

Tudor Jurgiu says he is in favor of a relationship with actors that is free and interactive: “In the case of the film “In the Fistank”, I tried this type of approach with the actors. I wanted to have a few moments in the movie to be treated in a very realistic manner, and a few others where the actors broke out of this realistic convention and have the audience surprised by the over the top reaction. I was interested in this contrast. The tension within a couple makes people act very differently than they normally would. That is what I was interested in, this contrast that makes people break out of normality.”

18 out of the 1,550 films submitted were selected for the Cinefondation section, from 270 schools from all across the world. This year, Chile is present for the first time with a movie in this section entitled ‘Luna’, by Camila Luna Toledo. Jurgiu’s film is joined by productions from countries like Russia, the Czech Republic, Iran, the US, Belgium, Mexico, France and South Korea.