5 Minutes Too Late 2019
The destiny of the man who led the gendarme team after a LGBT film screening in Bucharest, revealed through an investigation by Liliana Calomfir, a young journalist known for her daring reporting.
The destiny of the man who led the gendarme team after a LGBT film screening in Bucharest, revealed through an investigation by Liliana Calomfir, a young journalist known for her daring reporting.
On behalf of a multinational company, a production assistant drives around the Romanian city of Bucharest, interviewing various citizens who have been injured due to work accidents to cast one of them in a “safety at work” video.
The film tells the story of a man, Mihai, who is going through midlife crisis. After a 15 years marriage, he tries to regain control over his own life and starts an affair. Though Mihai is the main character of the film, he is never seen onscreen, but his personality is shown through his mistress, mother and wife, as well as through gestures and attitude.
Natalia and Ginel leave their small Romanian Danube village to work abroad in Rotterdam. One evening, when she is assaulted after meeting a local, Natalia asks Ita, a friend from home turned into a crook, to help her.
As a football match paralyses Bucharest, Dana boards young Alex's cab. Once in front of her building, despite their obvious differences, Dana asks Alex to stay with her for the night. At any price.
Sami and Dora are husband and wife, they have an age-gap marriage filled with compromises. Now they are waiting the social worker from the adoption agency to come at their home to decide if they are eligible to adopt a child. But they are caught in a moral dilemma: can buying a life be the price of saving their own relationship?
Soare is a musician with too little inspiration and too many neurons baked from smoking weed. One day, he decides that his life has become too chaotic, so he begins writing a guide for surviving the moments when his reality stops making sense. Passing various surreal episodes, Soare hopes to regain his inspiration.
Cristina, a mid 30s secretary living in an alienating and hostile Bucharest, is trying to understand what it means being a bills-paying, ready-to-settle, social-ladder-climbing adult while still desperately wanting to be a good child for the single mom that raised her. She is also a character in a novel that a theatre director is turning into a feature. As the actors start setting into the story, their individual backgrounds, social circumstances and personal motivations begin to overlap with the fiction they were offered, making it their own, questioning it and shaping it. The result is what it’s supposed to be: a playful mesh of perceived reality and fabrication.
Moldova in the early 90s: Dima, a tractor driver, wants to be enrolled in the military troops to take part in the local war on the Transnistrian border. Vasea, an Afghan war veteran, joins him. While on their way to the front, they find a carbonized body. The authorities ignore them and won't help them to identify the body. Dima and Vasea decide to bury the corpse according to the proper Christian rituals, but not before setting out, together with the body, on an absurd journey to discover his identity.
Piciu and Bila seize an unexpected opportunity from a Romanian client and move to Los Angeles. But they soon realize that they have unwittingly fallen into the world of the credit card rip-off mafia.
Dan, a twenty-something security specialist, receives an ominous phone call. A spa resort. A high-profile client who triggers a game of unclear stakes. Dan gets a chance to go from nobody to somebody.
A description of Romania before Ceausescu's downfall, through the story of Nela. Daughter of a former colonel of the Securitate, the romanian political police. She refused to become like her sister, an agent of this Securitate, and lives with her father. After he died, she leaves Bucharest, and ends up in a little town, where she meets Mitica, a surgeon, another herself, laughing at everything.
Darclee is a lead singer for an opera company in Romania with a heavy load of responsibility. It seems the company is in dire need of a decent physical structure for their performances and a brace -- or more -- of good singers to improve their image and sales. In other words, they need just about everything except an excellent lead singer; Darclee fills that bill. And so the company rather unfairly leans on her to get the people and the funds they so desperately want.
Based on actual events which happened at the Radio Romania station in Bod-Brasov, during the beginning of the revolution for social liberation and for the country's national liberation, an anti-fascist and anti-imperialist revolution, on August 23, 1944. After King Michael I ousts the Nazi-allied dictator Ion Antonescu, Nazi troops struggle to recapture the Radio Romania station, their former headquarters in an attempt to regroup their forces, but are opposed by a determined band of anti-fascist fighters.
Four soldiers of different nationalities serve in small garrison on the territory of post-war Germany.
Alex, in his mid-thirties, is a quite neurotic character. When his mother is hospitalized with a stroke, the caring son's life gets out of track. At the hospital he finds himself in a burlesque kind of human zoo full of unexpected characters and surprising events. Trying to manage the situation in between everybody's advice, he's coming hypochondriac. While his mother seems to feel perfectly fine Alex is making his own set of mistakes - throughout with best intentions.
As a last resort, a girl diagnosed with cancer goes to an unconventional shaman.
An aged woman is taking a bath. While entering the water a new world reveals. The phone, on a chair, connects her with her son and keeps her linked to the world.
"Occident" is a bitter comedy about the people who want to emigrate from Romania, and about those who stay behind. The movie has a rich, interesting structure: there are three different stories - a weeklong in the film - that cross, interconnect and happen in the same period. The characters influence each others lives, sometimes even without knowing. Main characters from one story become secondary characters in another story. At the same time, scenes from the first part of the movie bring unexpected facts when seen the second or the third time. The stories do not have just one ending: the first story ends in each of the third parts in a different point, suggesting radically different solutions for the characters. The way in which the director fits time and links events together often produces thematically unexpected results.
Two girls begin to chat about another girl, a former lover of both. As they grow closer, the gap between them widens, as one them is looking for answers and love while safely closeted. A try-out for love confined within suffocating prejudices, in today's Romania.