Mothers are blamed for a lot, in cinema and in life. Their love is essential to a child s development, but too much of that same love is damaging. Wanting a close relationship with your adult child is healthy, but how close is too close? One of the greatest strengths of Child s
Pose , Romania s 2014 Oscar-entry and winner of the Golden Bear this year in Berlin, is that these questions are presented, but no real answers are provided. The answers we get are murky, ambiguous,
disturbing. The truth is there, somewhere, but lost in an abyss of recriminations, resentment, and things too dark to discuss. It s an extremely strong and upsetting film, yet another example of the fascinating things going on in Romania s new wave, with a breathtaking lead performance by Luminita Gheorghiu as Cornelia, the competent career-woman in Bucharest, determined to clear her adult son s name.
collective by Alexander Nanau
BUCHAREST: Romania has been seriously affected by the Coronavirus pandemic, which shut down film production and cinemas for several months. The closing of cinemas and the decrease of TV advertisement resulted in a significant decrease of the amount of money for the national Film Fund and, as a consequence, no production grants were allotted for 2020 and most likely won t be allotted for 2021 as well.
Although officially re-launched in January 2020, when it was taken over by the Ministry of Economy, the cash rebate scheme didn t function in 2020, and at the end of 2020 most of the projects already shot since the scheme opened in 2018 were waiting for the rebate.
Gabriel Achim is currently in late post-production with his third feature,
Snowing Darkness. The exclusively Romanian project is being produced by
Anca Puiu through Mandragora and co-produced by Iadasarecasa.
The screenplay, written by Achim and
Cosmin Manolache, follows Teo (
Bogdan Dumitrache), a director who is immersed in rehearsals for his new feature centring on the personal turmoil he has suffered, caused by the death of his daughter. As the main story unfolds, strange and unsettling frame stories arise, which teeter between fiction and real life. The more the performance tries to disguise real life, the more it is disrupted by life’s unpredictable course, prompting a series of ambiguous, unbearable and absurd events.