Sieranevada by Romanian film director Cristi Puiu from 2016 became my most memorable film of last week, making me once more aware of the treasure we have in the films of the Romanian New Wave. This New Wave was launched by Puiu’s masterpiece The Death of Mr. Lazarescu from 2005, the shuttle of a dying old man from hospital to hospital unable to find one that will treat him.

The Romanian New Wave is a genre of realist, austere, intelligent film with minimal use of music. This genre has as a backdrop the change from the Communist era to democracy and free-market capitalism in Romania. Residues of life in that era continue to bother people, society, families, their relationships. The films usually have in common a sudden crisis (finding a hospital in The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, trying to get an illegal abortion in Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, a fatal car incident in Netzer’s Child’s Pose, the family commemoration after the death of the patriarch in Sieranevada). In those situations ethical choices need to be made. Individual freedoms are constrained not in the least due to their historical legacy. Its subject is what happens in and among people who have got into dire circumstances and who have difficulties escaping their past.

Sieranevada is a patience demanding exercise (almost three hours!), yet an amazing portrait of a family ripped apart through lots of mistrust and frustrations from the past. Most of the time the scene is a cramped apartment in which the extended family gathers for a wake 40 days after the death of the family patriarch. There is hardly place for the camera; it looks over shoulders, from the hallway, follows people who go from room to room to kitchen and back.

The family is ready for the elaborate meal which is waiting for them, but this is getting delayed all the time. The priest is late and they feel they cannot start eating before the ceremony is over. There are family traditions to honour, but things go wrong and it needs time to prepare. Uninvited people show up causing distress. Fertile ground for old and new hurts and frustrations to erupt, both personal, relational and political.  The family becomes a mirror of problems, tensions and opportunities in today’s Romania. And probably not too hard to use as a mirror to recognize under-the-surface tensions and harmful relational patterns in our own family gatherings!

If this stirs your interest and you want to see more of these Romanian New Wave films, here is my top-ten list among the ones I’ve seen so far:

1. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) by Cristi Puiu
2. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (2007) by Cristian Mungiu
3. Sieranevada (2016) by Cristi Puiu
4. Child’s Pose (2013) by Calin Peter Netzer
5. Graduation (2016) by Cristian Mungiu
6. Beyond the Hills (2012) by Cristian Mungiu
7. 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) by Corneliu Poromboiu
8. Scarred Hearts (2016) by Radu Jude
9. The Way I Spent the End of the World (2006) by Catalin Mitilescu
10. If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle (2010) by Florin Serban

Rinus, March 2020

*image & trailer posted for non commercial purposes under fair use 
of copyright material in recommendation of the film

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