Radio România Internațional

Tag: Porumboiu

  • January 2, 2020 UPDATE

    January 2, 2020 UPDATE

    Emergency calls — Almost 3 thousand emergency calls have been made in Romania in the last 48 hours, the authorities announced on Thursday. Fire fighters had to intervene in more than 260 cases and the SMURD teams – the Mobile Emergency Service for Resuscitation and Extrication — were called to intervene in 2,400 cases to provide qualified first aid or to extricate the victims of road accidents. Also rescuers intervened to help people out of hostile situations and were involved in as many as 200 missions for community protection. During the New Year celebrations 82 people were reported wounded by firecrackers and other pyrotechnic devices and 28 fires occurred. For the New Year mini holiday over 5,300 firefighters are on duty to ensure the citizens’ protection and safety.



    Eurostat – Romanian households allotted in 2018 only 1.9% of their total consumption expenses to catering services provided by restaurants, cafes, pubs and teashops, the smallest percentage reported in the EU. This figure is three times smaller than the average 7% reported in the EU, show data published by Eurostat. All in all, households in the EU spent more than 600 billion Euros (the equivalent of 3.8% of the EU’s GDP) to eat out. The largest amount of expenses allotted to catering services out of the total consumption expenses was reported in Ireland, Spain, Malta and Greece and the smallest amount of such expenses was reported in Romania, Poland and Lithuania. Between 2008 and 2018 the amount of expenses allotted for catering services out of the total consumption expenses increased in most EU countries except for Romania, Spain, Slovakia and Great Britain. In Romania expenses for catering services dropped sharply from 2.9% in 2008 to 1.9% in 2018.




    Film – The film La Gomera (The Whistlers) by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu is participating in the 31st edition of the Palm Springs International Film Festival in California, which is unfolding from January 2nd to 12th. 188 films from 81 countries will be presented in this year’s edition of the festival. Corneliu Porumboiu’s 5th feature film La Gomera was premiered in the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. The film tells the story of Cristi, a police officer who reaches the island of La Gomera (Spain) to learn ‘El Silbo’, a form of communication by whistling, which is specific to the area. His mission is to set free Zsolt, a controversial businessman who is detained in Bucharest.



    Prices — In Romania fuel prices dropped as of January 1 by an average of almost 7 eurocents. Also as of January 1 the minimum wage went up to 467 Euros per month and the value of one point in the fine system rose to 47 Euros. The fine point should have been kept at the level of 2019 but the law which freezes the price was challenged at the Constitutional Court.



    Madrid — One Romanian citizen died and another seven were injured in a car crash that occurred on Wednesday in Spain’s western region of Extremadura, on the highway to Seville. According to Radio Romania’s correspondent to Madrid, the eight Romanians were in a van stationing on the side of the road. Their car was hit by a truck running at a high speed. Ambulances, firefighters, the police and Red Cross representatives arrived at the location of the crash. The injured people have been taken to several hospitals in the area. (update by L. Simion)

  • La Gomera, by C. Porumboiu, Romania’s Entry at the Oscars

    La Gomera, by C. Porumboiu, Romania’s Entry at the Oscars

    La Gomera, the fifth feature film by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, is Romanias entry for the 2020 Academy Awards. It opened in Romanian theaters on September 13. La Gomera is among the Romanian movies to be nominated for the European Film Academy awards, premiered at Cannes this year, and had its North American premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, in the Masters section. Before the Romanian premiere, we talked to a part of the team that made the movie. We talked to director Porumboiu, actresses Rodica Lazar and Catrinel Marlon Menghia, and actor George Pistereanu. Porumboiu said that La Gomera is a natural continuation of his preoccupations as a filmmaker. He believes his movie is a policier thriller, and is happy he was accepted at the Oscars for the running. Here he is talking about it:

    “I was very honored. I cant wait to see the reception in Romanian cinemas, that is my main concern. That is because festivals are a great glue between directors, films, and movie theaters. I worked very well with the actors, I worked with Vlad Ivanov on several other projects, and it was always great. In fact, it was a pleasure working with all the actors in the movie. In the end, when you watch a movie, you see the actors first. And if the actors arent good, you may have the best script, the best idea, but the movie wont work. At least half my work as a director consists of that, working with actors.”

    The character played by Rodica Lazar in La Gomera is called Magda, who is a prosecutor. She described her as a nuanced character, with a sense of humor, who I enjoyed playing a lot.” We asked her what kind of challenges she faced playing the third prosecutor in her career, and what made her take it on:

    “It is a beautiful story, first and foremost it was the story. Then it was Corneliu Porumboiu himself, hes a challenge. All the characters are special, mysterious, La Gomera is a different kind of movie from his other movies, it was shot and edited differently. I didnt have to put on weight, or shave my head, it was none of that kind of challenge. However, it was a challenge for me as an actress, because I wanted to live up to the story, which is very interesting, and live up to Corneliu Porumboius demands, to the level of my co-star Vlad Ivanov.”

    The audience can admire Catrinel Melon Menghia as a femme fatale, Gilda, who is involved with the heads of the mafia on the island of La Gomera, where the locals use a whistling language. When he cast her in the role, he told her she should try to play the part as if she was Rita Hayworth in the film noir Gilda. Here is Catrinel Menghia:

    “It was tough for me, I had a lot of night scenes, and at some point the fatigue started showing. Now I watched the movie for the second time, and I thought the fatigue showed clearly in my eyes, but that screened fairly well, I seemed very focused in those scenes. It was difficult, we got caught in winter, summer, spring, but it was great. I can say we were like a big family, something that had never happened to me before, and neither did it happen to my colleagues, as they told me. Especially when we were on location, on La Gomera, we were together all the time, the technical team, we, the actors, and the production team. I remember how close we were. We spent so much time together that Corneliu actually had to keep an eye on us to make sure we went to bed at a reasonable hour, so we can get enough sleep to start shooting first thing in the morning.”

    Actor Geore Pistereanu plays in the movie an organized crime cop. As always, he prepared for his part thoroughly:

    “I started my preparations like I do with all of my parts. I went to Organized Crime, I met a lady prosecutor there who answered all my questions, and put me in touch with cops who helped me. That period was the most important to figure out the character. We think we know a lot about policemen, gendarmes, but when you do research you realize that things are very different. As far as working with Corneliu Porumboiu, I understood right away what he wanted from me, and from my character, so we worked together very well. I worked great with Vlad Ivanov and Rodica Lazar, it is great luck to work with talented actors who actually deserve all their awards. I worked great with Istvan Teglas, my colleague from the National Theater in Bucharest, it is great for an actor who doesnt want to stagnate to have good partners.”

    La Gomera is Porumboius first film shot outside Romania, namely in Spain and Singapore.

  • Romanian Films in Cannes

    Romanian Films in Cannes

    Two Romanian films have their premieres at the 72nd edition of the Cannes Film Festival, running between May 14 and 25. La Gomera, directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, was included in the official competition, while the short film The Last Trip to the Seaside, directed by Adi Voicu, was screened in the Semaine de la Critique section.



    La Gomera, Corneliu Porumboiu’s fifth feature length fiction movie, was filmed on location in Romania, Spain, and Singapore in 2018, featuring a Romanian and Spanish cast. Cristi is a corrupt Romanian cop involved in a 30 million Euro deal with organized crime, who goes to the La Gomera island, in order to learn El Silbo, the local whistling language. This coded kind of communication is supposed to help him free Zsolt, a drug dealer in detention in Bucharest, and the only member of the drug ring who knows where the money is hidden. Corneliu Porumboiu told us how he came about the story:



    Corneliu Porumboiu: I was in France, and I saw a documentary about the island and this language. This was ten years ago, as I was finishing Police, Adjective, and the documentary stuck in my head. I started reading up on the whistling language, and I envisaged the film as being a crime thriller. I wrote several versions, and four years ago I took it up again, and eventually realized that I will take it into the film noir genre. Making this movie took a lot of research. I used the Internet at first, then I went to the island to see what I was dealing with. Because there are things that you can’t just read about, you have to be there. I went to La Gomera three or four times, one week at a time. In addition, because the language is protected, and is taught in schools as a compulsory subject, I worked with a teacher, the head of the El Silbo language department, who came to Romania to coach the actors. This was my opportunity to work with an expert.



    Corneliu Porumboiu sees La Gomera as a natural extension of his preoccupations:



    Corneliu Porumboiu: “Theme wise, the movie is linked to two of my previous movies, Was It or Was It Not, and Police, Adjective, which were also centered on language. In Was It or Was It Not, an entire community was trying to define a concept, that of revolution, in order to understand what they had lived through, while Police, Adjective is a movie about bureaucratic and political language, so this movie came as a natural extension. I think all my movies deal with communication, it is one of my recurring themes.



    The short film The Last Trip to the Seaside, directed by Adi Voicu, screened in the Semaine de la Critique section, a section focusing on uncovering emerging talent in cinema, is the director’s second fiction short. The first was The Fog, which won awards in Angers and Sankt Petersburg. The plot unfurls in the compartment of a train going to the seaside. The six passengers converse, but one moment of suspicion derails the entire interaction. Before trying his hand at fiction, Adi Voicu directed, by himself or in collaboration, several documentaries, dealing with a variety of subjects, including the Danube Delta and Romanians in Ukraine. He said he would not limit himself to this type of movies, and that it doesn’t matter what form you give a story:



    Adi Voicu: “Fiction movies are cinema too, and if some stories go well as documentaries, others go better as fiction. I think this is the reason for which fiction appeared, out of the need to tell some stories when you cannot resort to documentaries. For example, you cannot film inside a police van as it goes to the police precinct, it’s against the law. Therefore, you have to resort to fiction to show a scene like that.



    One of the actors featured in the short film The Last Trip to the Seaside, Ana Ciontea, spoke to us ahead of the premiere in Cannes:



    Ana Ciontea: “I am very happy that the movie was selected for the Cannes festival, and I congratulate Adi Voicu, I believed in his films right from the start. It was a great experience to act in The Last Trip to the Seaside, the script won me over right away, even though Adi made some changes along the way. What also won me over was Adi’s attention to detail. During rehearsal I became convinced that I was going to be in a very good movie. Also, very importantly, Adi Voicu boosted our confidence. This moved me, and helped me very much.



    (translated by: Calin Cotoiu)

  • 16.05.2019

    16.05.2019

    Intempéries – Mercredi, la pluie torrentielle a touché une trentaine de localités des départements du centre, de l’ouest et du nord de la Roumanie. Une centaine d’habitations ont été inondées, des dizaines de personnes ont été évacuées, alors que les alluvions ont bloqué plusieurs routes et voies ferrées. Qui plus est, plusieurs rivières des départements de Bistriţa Năsăud et Maramureş (nord) ont été placées en alerte rouge aux inondations, les hydrologues mettant en garde contre une croissance rapide des débits, au – dessus des niveaux dangereux. L’Inspection pour les situations d’urgence a fait savoir qu’environ 5000 sapeurs-pompiers étaient prêts à intervenir pour aider la population et l’administration publique si nécessaire. Pour leur part, les météorologues ont placé en alerte jaune à la pluie et aux tempêtes 7 départements du sud du pays et les zones montagneuses de 5 autres départements jusqu’à vendredi matin. Sur le reste du territoire, l’avertissement à l’instabilité atmosphérique accentuée reste valable jusqu’à dimanche. Par ailleurs, la Roumanie bénéficiera d’une aide financière non remboursable de près de 8,2 millions d’euros provenant du Fonds de solidarité de l’UE pour refaire l’infrastructure endommagée par les calamités naturelles survenues l’été dernier dans le nord-est du pays.

    Météo – Ce jeudi donc, la météo est toujours instable en Roumanie ; le ciel est couvert, il pleut et le vent est assez fort sur plusieurs régions. Les températures maximales de la journée iront de 14 à 22 degrés. 15 degrés et un peu de soleil après une matinée pluvieuse à Bucarest.

    Téléphonie – La Roumanie est un des premiers pays au monde à lancer des services de communications 5G. Un opérateur de téléphonie mobile, présent sur le marché roumain, vient d’annoncer l’activation, à Bucarest, des premiers sites radio de son réseau 5G. Les abonnés auront accès à cette technologie de dernière génération au fur et à mesure que des téléphones portables compatibles arrivent sur le marché. L’opérateur de téléphonie mobile en question a fait savoir qu’il couvrirait d’autres grandes villes roumaines d’ici la fin de l’année.

    Taxi – Les modifications opérées par le gouvernement roumain à la loi régissant le service de taxi sont entrées en vigueur aujourd’hui. Le texte réglementaire a été modifié suite à des protestations relativement récentes des chauffeurs de taxi, qui ont demandé des sanctions réelles contre les conducteurs de véhicules offrant des services de taxi masqués, grâce notamment aux applications en ligne. A partir d’aujourd’hui, un tel conducteur automobile qui offre des services de transport payant des personnes, sans autorisation taxi classique, peut être sanctionné par une amende et par l’interdiction d’utiliser son véhicule pendant six mois. Le gouvernement a affirmé qu’il allait bientôt réglementer le marché de transport alternatif du type Uber.

    Eurovision – La seconde demi-finale de la 64e édition de l’Eurovision de la chanson a lieu ce jeudi soir à Tel Aviv. Les représentants de 18 pays sont en compétition, parmi eux, la représentante de la Roumanie Ester Peony avec sa chanson « On a Sunday ». La finale du concours aura lieu ce samedi, 18 mai. 41 pays sont inscrits à l’Eurovision de la chanson 2019.

    Cannes – Le film « La Gomera » (Les siffleurs) du réalisateur roumain Corneliu Porumboiu sera présenté en première mondiale, ce samedi au festival de Cannes. La pellicule est en lice pour la Palme d’or aux côtés d’autres films réalisés par de grands artistes du cinéma mondial, tels Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodóvar, Ken Loach, Terrence Malick ou encore les frère Dardenne. Ce n’est pas la première fois que Corneliu Porumboiu se trouver sur la Croisette. En 2015, il a remporté le prix Un certain talent de la section Un certain regard pour son long métrage « Comoara » (Le trésor). De même, en 2009, son film « Policier, adjectif » il a été récompensé du grand prix du jury et du prix FIPRESCI. Et c’est toujours à Cannes que son long métrage de début, «12h08 à l’est de Bucarest » avait remporté le trophée la Caméra d’or en 2006. Cette année, la 72e édition du festival de Cannes se déroule du 14 au 25 mai.

    Nuit des musées – Ce samedi, 18 mai, la Roumanie organise elle aussi la 15e édition de la Nuit des musées. Plus de 150 musées et entités culturelles seront ouverts partout dans le pays, proposant aux visiteurs des activités très variées, adaptées à toutes les tranches d’âge et à tous les goûts : expositions, projections, pièces de théâtre, concerts, ateliers créatifs et autres. Initiée par le ministère de la Culture de France, tenue sous le patronage du Conseil de l’Europe, de l’UNESCO et du Conseil international des musées, la Nuit des musées est un événement attendu avec impatience en Roumanie, où elle est organisée par le Réseau national des musées.

    Tennis – Une journée pleine, aujourd’hui, à Rome, pour les joueuses roumaines de tennis Simona Halep et Mihaela Buzărnescu. Elles doivent jouer deux matchs pour obtenir une place dans les quarts de finale du tournoi accueilli par la capitale italienne, tous les matchs de mercredi ayant été reportés en raison de la pluie. Ce jeudi donc, Simona Halep (n° 2 WTA) doit affronter tout d’abord la Tchèque Marketa Vondrousova (n° 44 WTA), alors que Mihaela Buzărnescu rencontrera Julia Goerges, d’Allemagne (n° 18 WTA).

  • April 18, 2019 UPDATE

    April 18, 2019 UPDATE

    CABINET The Romanian Justice Minister Tudorel Toader Thursday announced his resignation, and said he would stay in the Ministry until the name of his replacement was published in the Official Journal. On Wednesday, PM Viorica Dăncilă sent President Klaus Iohannis the proposal for his replacement. The main partner in the ruling coalition, the Social Democratic Party, nominated Deputy Eugen Nicolicea to replace him. The SDP decided to withdraw political support for the Justice Minister after he refused to pass controversial changes to the criminal codes. PM Viorica Dancila also made new nominations for the positions of Minister for Romanians Abroad and Minister for European Funds, along with the resignations of the Minister for European Funds, Rovana Plumb, and of the Minister for Romanians Abroad, Natalia Intotero. The two are running for the European Parliament in the upcoming elections. Deputy Oana Florea was nominated for the Ministry for European Funds, and Senator Liviu Brăiloiu for the Ministry for Romanians Abroad.




    CANNES The latest feature film by the Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, “La Gomera / The Whistlers, has been included in the official competition of the Cannes International Film Festival. The film will have its world premiere in the 72nd edition of the Festival, to be held on May 14th to 25th. Cristi, a Romanian corrupt policeman involved in a 30-million euro deal with the mafia, gets to La Gomera Island, in Spain, to learn ‘El Silbo’, a whistling language used by the locals. The code will help him release a criminal arrested in Bucharest, the only one in the gang who knows where the money is kept. Corneliu Porumboiu has been awarded several times in Cannes, his “Police, Adjective having won in 2009 the Grand Prize and the FIPRESCI award in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section.




    ROMANIA – FRANCE Exhibitions at the National History Museum and the Museum of Art Collections, the 5th edition of Spotlight – the International Light Festival, and a Theo Lawrence & The Hearts concert, were included on Thursday in the opening programme for the Romanian section of the 2019 Romania – France Cultural Season. Romanias National Art Museum opens an exhibition entitled “Species of Spaces: the Societe Generale Contemporary Art Collection, in the presence of the President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, the Culture Minister Valer-Daniel Breaz, his French counterpart Franck Riester and the Ambassador of France to Bucharest, Michele Ramis. Launched in November in France, the cultural dialogue between the 2 countries will continue in Romania until July 14th, with scores of performances, concerts, film screenings, literature-related events, exhibitions and roundtables held in more than 30 cities. The Cultural Season ended in France on April 16th and included events held in over 100 cities.




    MASS MEDIA Hatred towards journalists has triggered violence and an intense climate of fear, reads the 2019 World Press Freedom Index released on Thursday by Reporters without Borders NGO. The organisation warns that the number of safe countries for journalists continues to decline. According to the report, only 24 out of the 180 countries covered by the barometer are safe. First ranks Norway, for the 3rd year in a row, followed by Finland, Sweden and Netherlands, whereas the countries that rank the lowest in terms of press freedom are China, Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan. Romania is placed 47th in the World Press Freedom Index, which says that part of the Romanian mass media have been gradually turned into propaganda tools, are under political control, with obscure funding mechanisms and editorial policies subordinated to the interests of their owners.



    (translated by: Ana-Maria Popescu)