Romanian film review – Berlinale 2023: Curious and caring

The year’s first major (European) film festival, the Berlin International Film Festival (in short Berlinale), wrapped two weeks ago, and was a return to the classical, pre-pandemic form, with physical attendance in all sections and in-theatre screenings, both for the industry and the local audience.

The Romanian entries this year were both in Forum, a section dedicated to more experimental cinema. Vlad Petri’s tender Între revoluții/ Between Revolutions went on to win the FIPRESCI prize, awarded by the Federation of International Film Critics. Put together from archive material and inspired by real documents, the film follows the friendship of two women, one Romanian, and one Iranian, lived through letters in the period spanning the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the Romanian one in 1989, and a bit of the following years.

Sebastian Mihăilescu’s Mammalia was the other Romanian production selected. Following his much-talked-about hybrid debut Pentru mine tuești Ceaușescu/ You Are Ceaușescu to Me, the young director has picked a surreal take on masculinity and contemporary society as his fiction follow-up, with plenty of absurd humour and head-scratching stuff. Both films will premiere nationally in autumn, and I will dedicate more space to them at that point.

Not a Romanian production, but featuring Romanian actors, Bas Devos' Here (Belgium) was one of the most beautiful films of the festival, and won the Encounters competition, a young section dedicated to films that are aesthetically and conceptually more daring. And what beautiful encounters this film features. Romanian-born actor Stefan Gota plays a young Romanian working several jobs in Brussels who prepares to go home during his summer holidays. He meets with colleagues, friends, his sister, and, on many of his nature walks, also a young woman who studies moss (yes, as in the moss growing on trees). What might sound cheesy or pretentious is a gorgeous, uplifting film about everyday wonders and the joy of being curious.