Europe Endless - Eastern Europe: Aurora (Dir Cristi Puiu , 3h4m, 2010)
We could go into great detail of the storied history of Romanian cinema, from very late 19th Century, through the First and Second World Wars, and of course, life under communism: together they depict the arrival of an unexpected powerhouse in Eastern European cinema. Let us instead consider the now. One is struck by a nation of film-goers - even the Soviets were keen to screen films such as Rome Open City and In the Heat of the Night - and one that, even under the control of the USSR, equipped its filmmakers and their crews in a system that rivalled any nation's film schools. Romanian cinema would only become more prominent in the late 2000s and early 2010s, as the Romanian New Wave emerged; at its head, two short films would set the stage for this new movement: Cristi Puiu's Cigarettes and Coffee , and Cătălin Mitulescu's Trafic (both 2004). Whilst Mitulescu would be eclipsed by others in the movement, most notably Cristian Mungiu's Palm...
