The Romanians Are Coming!: The nonfiction gems of “Making Waves U.S. Tour of Romanian Cinema”

Hard to believe that it’s only been a little over three decades since the people of Romania decided they’d had enough of their country’s communist strongman and rose up to topple his suffocating regime. And it’s even harder to believe that out of the ashes of the Ceauşescu dictatorship eventually rose a remarkable Romanian New Wave in the mid-aughts, one that put this small nation on the cinematic map from Cannes, to Venice, to the Berlinale and beyond.

But, for anyone paying close attention, the signs were there at least a decade earlier, most notably in the output directly on the heels of the 1989 revolution. Thankfully, there’s “Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema” to set the record straight. “The Romanians: 30 Years of Cinema Revolution” retro, the largest series devoted to Romanian film ever to be presented on these shores, began at NYC’s Film Forum last year, and was scheduled to tour through this spring to the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); the Seattle Northwest Film Forum and SIFF Film Center; the Lightbox Film Center in Philadelphia; the ASU Marston Exploration in Phoenix; and Silver Spring’s AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, before wrapping up at DC’s National Gallery of Art.

And to read all about this spectacular (pre-pandemic) lineup visit Global Comment.