Glissando

In a devastating story rife with visual metaphors, Romanian director Mircea Daneliuc traces the slow mental disintegration of a confirmed gambler, using his disorder as an allusion to a greater national and social disorder. Set in the 1930s, the middle-class gambler meets an elderly man who seems to bring him good luck at the gaming tables. Rather than treasure his friendship and the good fortune it brings, the gambler takes advantage of his friend, and by his actions drives the man to suicide. Unable to reconcile his own mental demons, the ...

Microphone Test

A television cameraman and his subject find themselves in the middle of an intertwined professional and personal dilemma.

The Eleventh Commandment

Free adaptation of the book "The Pitesti phenomenon" by Paul Goma.

Floating Things

While working in Europe, Avram comes to realize that Italians are paying good money for trained dogs that can protect them from the waves of immigrants. That's Avram's big-time idea: he returns to Romania to start breeding watch dogs which he can later export to Italy. As it happens, he settles next to a camp of immigrants recently sent back from Rome. Thus, the Italian tension is willy-nilly reenacted on the banks of the Danube. Avram's life gets complicated. He starts having an affair with his own daughter in law, lands in conflict with hi...

The Snails' Senator

This Romanian dramatic comedy offers metaphorical commentary on life after Ceausescu's reign as it tells the story of a rural community turned topsy-turvy in their mad quest for the snails a prominent senator has requested for his dinner. The trouble begins when a rather imposing, pompous senator comes to visit a small rural Romanian town for a ribbon-cutting ceremony for their new hydro-electric dam. After he finishes his speech, the senator is accosted by a Swiss film crew eager to interview him. The senator is inordinately concerned with ...

The Conjugal Bed

Romania had it rough under its last communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and things are even rougher now. Before, their problems were oppression and poverty. Now, their problem is mostly poverty - and plenty of it. In this grim comedy (to call it a black comedy would be to paint too perky a picture of it), Vasile (Gheorghe Dinica)has a wife whom he's fond of, and a mistress, whom he's fonder of. He manages a nearly abandoned movie theater, and makes just about nothing doing it. When his wife announces she's pregnant, he nearly goes frantic...

The Cruise

The best workers from various factories in the communist system are rewarded a cruise on the Danube. The people in charge fight for bureaucratic reasons while the young ones are looking for adventure.