42-year-old Elena has big dreams. The beating heart of her remote Moldovan village, she organises community clean-ups, supports lonely elders, and each year dons a Santa Claus costume to bring joy to her neighbours. But beneath the suit, Elena is driven by ambition and a desire to shake things up. Her dream? To become mayor.
Nata and Aaron - one Moldovan and one American get married in Moldova. Antics follow, Nata gets kidnapped, Aaron drinks champagne out of her shoe, a seven year old sleeps drunk on the floor. Will their marriage be as they hoped, or will it go awry?
Like Márta Mészáros, Florica Holban experienced losing her parents and institutionalization first-hand as a young child, which later triggered her long-term interest in the lives of the children growing up in state care. Holban’s Who Is to Blame? has something else in common with Mészáros’s Let All the Children Smile: they both include sequences filmed at the same orphanage in Bucharest (Orphanage No. 6)—Mészáros in the mid-50s, Holban a decade later. The two films also share a certain discretion regarding the role of the State, which assumed parental responsibility for children abandoned or separated from their parents. Here, both directors allow, albeit only briefly, the lonely and deprived children to appear as individuals with their own histories and traumas. Unlike Mészáros, however, Holban approaches her topic through a judicial lens: numerous sequences from her film were shot at the Tribunal, and the film credits a prosecutor as a consultant.
Animation short based on orthodox themes.
Ana Blandiana, one of Europe’s most important poets, is a symbol in the fight for democracy and freedom of speech, values again under threat. A history refracted through poetry, 'Between Silence and Sin' explores the power of the word as the last bastion of a nation’s collective soul in the face of oppression.
A satire of artificiality in advertising, especially surprising due to the moment when it was made, in the mid 1980s. The ironic clichés anticipate the sexualized imagination of the 1990s: young women biting lasciviously from a piece of chocolate that melts on their face, lovers sipping allusively on a champagne, the cork of which pops under pressure. Advertising is, at the same time, a tribute to the efforts of the shooting crew, forced to work in difficult conditions - that are hyperbolized in the film - and to find all sorts of ingenious solutions so that the implausible situations they present look as polished and as desirable as possible.
A little bear cub grew up very lazy. Spring came, but the little bear did not want to wake up and went to chase after the cold Winter's sleigh. Soon Bear got to the palace of Santa Claus, where he had many funny adventures. Here the little boy understood a lot, learned a lot. Now Mishka will no longer be a layabout.
Life told through a series of memories.
A compassionate portrait of a lonely old man’s attempt to reconnect with his estranged family is transformed into an investigative cinema verité procedural.
