Category: World of Culture

Actress Cosmina Stratan has been short-listed for “Shooting Stars”, a programme addressing Europe’s young talents. Shooting Stars is held between February 8th and 10th as part of the Berlin International Film Festival. Now that she has been short-listed, Cosmina Stratan will be joining such high profile actors as Rachel Weisz, Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan, Melanie Laurent, for whom Shooting Stars was a shortcut to fame. There are also other young Romanian actors, such as Ana Ularu, Dragos Bucur, Maria Popistasu and Ada Condeescu who in previous years were short-listed for the Shooting Stars programme, which Cosmina Stratan sees as a great opportunity.

We recall that at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival Cosmina jointly with her partner in the movie Cristina Flutur scooped the best leading actress award for her role in Cristian Mungiu’s “Beyond the Hills”. The film’s screenplay also grabbed the award for best screenplay in Cannes and is inspired form Tatiana Niculescu Bran’s “Deadly Confession” based on a true story. In 2005, a 23-year old girl died in Valsui County’s Tanacu Monastery during an exorcism ritual, with the priest and four nuns taking part in it. Cristian Mungiu’ s production tells the tale of two young girls, Alina (Cristina Flutur) and Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) who had grown up together in an orphanage and later reunite in an isolated Romanian monastery. Alina dreams of settling in Germany, where Voichita would join her. However, Voichita is strongly attached to the monastic way of life.

Although two years have passed since the film was launched, Cosmina Stratan still feels attached to her character and to the time she spent on set with the shooting crew.

”I hardly realized how these two years have passed. At wintertime I always think of the film, as most of the scenes were shot in winter. Anyhow, the film is always on my mind. ‘Beyond the Hills’ has so far remained my most important landmark and it’s highly likely to remain so. It means a lot to me, it is my first feature film, offering me the chance to work with Cristian Mungiu. I don’t think there will ever be any other project which I will hold just as dear as this one. And I don’t know if I will ever repeat this performance again”.

Cosmina Stratan was simply taken aback by the best performance award she received in Cannes. She did not expect the award to go to her. She told us more about her being short-listed for the Shooting Stars programme and about her forthcoming film.

“The difference between my participation in Cannes and the one I had in Berlin is that with Shooting Starts I had a lot of time on my hands to think and have a strong desire to be short-listed. Any actor aspires to be part of that program alongside filmmaking professionals, agents, casting directors, producers. My next film will be shot in Berlin this spring. It is the debut feature of a German director. I can’t tell you the title yet, and I don’t think there has been any final decision on the title. I play the lead role.“

If quite a few of the actors want to make a name for themselves featuring in a super-production, Cosmina Stratan is mainly keen on screenplay, on a story. The screenplay and the fact that filmmaker Cristian Mungiu holds her in high esteem prompted Cosmina to feature in “Beyond the Hills.”

“I believe it’s the story I’m mostly interested in, the story and the characters. And while I do the casting, I’m also keen on developing a relationship with the director, since it is crucial for both of us to be on the same wavelength. And you get the hang of it right from the start. These are the elements I focus on when I pick up a film or when I’m being presented with an offer. It’s not the budget that I have in mind, nor am I keen on other aspects having to do with promotion or visibility, if I can find all the things I am interested in, it’s easier for me to get involved.“

Yet Cosmina did not make a name for herself in the filmmaking industry alone. Theatre draws her in too, being one of the reasons why she does not want to live Romania. Speaking again is Cosmina Stratan.

“I don’t want to leave the country for good. Leaving Romania is not an option for me, as I also want to feature on stage. And it seems to me it is impossible to be able to make it outside Romania. It’s rather hard to speak another language on stage.“

Now in its 17th edition, the Shooting Stars program is jointly organized by the European Film Promotion (EFP) and the EFP member organizations, among which the Romanian Film Promotion Association. “Shooting Stars” is set to promote Europe’s most talented young actors at international level, for whom the program facilitates the encounter with leading names in the filmmaking industry (great actors, directors, famous producers, casting directors).

Less known than the other two filmmakers, Vlad Petri graduated from the National University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest. He specialized as a documentary filmmaker and photographer and covered the social protests in Bucharest in 2012 and 2013, posting on line films and snapshots taken from the event. He is mainly interested in filming immediate, personal reality as well in exploring the social transformations he witnesses.

“I am mostly interested in covering street events, events that are taking place in the square, a public space of debates, initiatives and protests. I want to see how this space changes and the social impact it has. I’m interested in the people there, the way they talk and convey messages. I intend to go to University Square in downtown Bucharest more often and distribute my films exclusively on line trying to keep pace with the dynamics of the events,” says the director.

The documentary, “Bucharest, where are you?” is an outcome of Vlad Petri’s interest in the “square as a public space of debate”; the film was selected to represent Romania in the International Film Festival in Rotterdam.

Vlad Petri: “I have been working on this production for two years. And I was happy when it got selected, because this festival is one of the most important in Europe and we are waiting to see what feedback we get from there. The film features events that took place in Bucharest in 2012. We had a total of one hour and 20 minutes of footage in which we tried to tell a comprehensive and well-structured story. We tried to give the footage a thread leading people to a certain story.”

Radu Jude’s short film, “Shadow of a Cloud” tells the story of a priest, played by theatre director Alexandru Dabija, who is called on a hot summer day to give the last rites to a dying woman. “It’s a film full of meanings. Maybe the most important is a certain line in the priest’s prayer, “my miserable life went away like slumber, like a shadow of a cloud”, says director Radu Jude thus explaining the title of his film, which got selected last year for the “Quinzaine des Realisateurs” section of the Cannes Film Festival.

Director Radu Jude: “There is something inside that prompts me to see things in this way. Chekhov described that situation better, through a character in “Uncle Vanya”, who says; ‘I have for a long time believed that man’s destiny is to be tragic, but eventually I realized his destiny was to be ridiculous.’ And there is something funny about how people relate to their problems, something that doesn’t necessarily rule out sadness or suffering. So, I am particularly interested in this kind of situations, when sadness, misery and drama blend until they no longer border on the ridiculous.”

“I wish films to be as impure as possible. When I first started making films, I was very careful to be coherent in terms of style. I wanted to be very much aware of the process, very much in control, but I eventually realized that such an approach would actually waste energies which might take the film to other directions and lay emphasis on things that shouldn’t necessarily be emphasized”, Radu Jude said.

Just like his production “Police, Adjective”, director Corneliu Porumboiu’s latest film “When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism” has divided audiences into two groups: those who believe that a film has to have a story and those standing for a less narrative type of films. According to film critic Tudor Caranfil, the film is “a challenge, the most thrilling experimental film in Romanian cinematography”.

In turn, critic Andrei Gorzo has described it as “a hyper-subtle anti-romance”. The production features Paul, a film director played by Bogdan Dumitrache, who is shooting a film. He’s about to shoot a nude scene and has a series of discussions with his lead actress Alina played by Diana Avramut, with whom he has a love affair, with the producer played by Mihaela Sarbu, with a colleague and with a physician. The film has only 17 scenes, most of them fixed; in an interview director Porumboiu confessed his intention was to speak about the making of a film and the difficulties a director faces in the process.

Corneliu Porumboiu: “I was interested in the relationships between the characters and the story itself. I got the idea three years ago, when a new law of cinematography was about to be drafted. According to that draft law, a contest at the National Center of Cinematography involved scenes from a film. That triggered memories from my student years, when certain constraints were imposed. I recalled the time when I used to shoot scenes at home, timing every one of them. And this is how I got the idea of my future film, which also gives an insight into my debut in the filmmaking industry.”

The Rotterdam Film Festival, the most important in Benelux, brings together over 3000 journalists and professionals from the filmmaking industry. One of the main objectives of the festival is to promote the most talented young directors.

The National Culture Day was marked on January 15^th by the Casa Radio Publishers (owned by the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation) through the launch of a CD series including remarkable recordings of Eminescu’s poems, which can be found in Radio Romania’s Archives. The CD box entitled “Poems by Eminescu”, the princeps edition, the first printed edition of Eminescu’s poems compiled in 1883 by the then great literary critic Titu Maiorescu, now in audio format, invites us to listen to Eminescu’s poems as recited along the years. The recordings dating from the early 1960s feature some of Romania’s greatest actors among whom Ludovic Antal, Emil Botta, Clody Bertola, George Calboreanu, Ion Caramitru, Constantin Codrescu, Elvira Godeanu, Ion Manolescu, Mariana Mihuţ, Alexandru Repan and George Vraca.

At the launching ceremony, the poet Florin Iaru began his speech by saying that: “interpreting Eminescu’s works is the most dangerous thing in the world”.

”Mihai Eminescu is the best known poet writing in the Romanian language, that is why his work was subject to a lot of prejudice. He was considered a visionary, the fundamental Romanian, the legend of Romanian poetry. But all these big words have nothing to do with the poet Mihai Eminescu. Because poetry is neither a monument, nor a cathedral, obligation, pride or national sentiment. A poet becomes a national poet only if the whole nation believes his poems are good, if most individuals consider him a landmark poet. If you wake me up in the middle of the night, I can recite poems by Eminescu. Because once you learn a poem you will never forget it. That is why in Romania there are very few poetry readers. And that is also why I do not believe in the national poet notion. Mihai Eminescu had his universe of ideas which engendered his poetry, and this is one of those unrepeatable experiences in the history of a certain culture.”

Around the National Culture Day, marked on January 15^th, Bookhacolic.ro, a Romanian site dedicated to books, invited some contemporary poets to participate in a survey focusing on the poet Mihai Eminescu. The survey asked what Eminescu means today, more than a century and a half since his birth, and what experiences these poets had when reading Eminescu’s poetry.

Here is what poet Radu Vancu wrote: ”Eminescu is maybe the Romanian poet whose works I have frequently returned to. As a student, what I liked best were his visionary insights, especially his apocalyptic imagery, on which I wrote my graduation thesis. Since I turned 30, I tried to read again and again those poems, which anticipate the biographic poetics, from Bacovia to the two-thousanders, starting with the sonnets of 1879. What seems to me to be exemplary in Eminescu, aside from his unbelievably, almost inhumanly pure biography, is the fact that all those poetics, so different from one another, are being experienced equally intensely; he experienced each and every poetics (as well as every poem) as if his whole life depended on it. And, in a way, it depended on that. He is the poet the entire Romanian poetry depends on, after all.”

Speaking again is the poet Florin Iaru.

”Aside from the technique, the glow, rhythm and stress, aside from the rhetoric, there is something unparalleled, which has no equivalent in our material world. It is that kind of ‘feeling’, as critic Titu Maiorescu would say. You feel the presence of something incredible in his poems, and the hardest thing to do is to explain why you feel it. There’s something filling you with satisfaction and melancholy, starting with his well known metaphors like lonely poplars, the rippling lake, the emperor and the downtrodden worker. Eminescu was a skilful poet, a great creator of language. Nothing was impossible for him. He toppled rhyme patterns in Romanian, stress marks, prejudices, he acted like a poet for whom language was an almost shapeless matter, in which all data was embedded. It seems like all those data were just waiting to be recombined. The most difficult thing is to read out Eminescu’s poems, because you may wish to add meaning to something, and the poet didn’t want to say anything more than he did, literally. Looking for profound patterns of meaning is a waste of time. Coming back to the CDs brought out by the ‘Casa Radio’ Publishers, it is great that well-established, famous actors read out Eminescu’s poetry, most importantly because they are actors who think, shake off conventions and grant the text its freedom. And that’s why there is something natural about the lines.”

The cover of the new release in the “Golden Tape Library” Collection, the “Show of Poetry” series, is fine artist Daniel Ivascu’s own version of the original volume of Eminescu’s ”Poems”.

Here is more from Gellu Dorian himself: “We came up with the idea of this prize right after the Revolution, in June 1990. We knew that in June 1989 Mihai Eminescu’s centenary was celebrated. Right after the Revolution, in an attempt to change the format of literary meetings which were way too formal and full of fake eulogy and untrue things about Eminescu’s life and work, we decided to initiate in Botosani, with the help of the municipality, the “Mihai Eminescu” National Poetry Award. It was only in March 1991 that the Local Council, following heated debates, established this award officially”.

The “Mihai Eminescu” National Poetry Award, is not granted easily, that’s why it has acquired value in time. A proof thereof is the confession of this year’s winner, Ion Muresan from the city of Cluj-Napoca, who says that to him this award is, quote, “ an access card to the Romanian poetry’s elite club, given that the most important poets of the last 50 years have been granted this award.” Unquote.

Poet Gellu Dorian: “From the very beginning we wanted to grant this poetry award to a Romanian contemporary writer, for lifetime achievement. Hence the “Opera Omnia” title added to the award. In order to make this award legitimate, we established a national jury, made up of outstanding personalities of literary criticism and literature and professors from four Romanian university centers – Bucharest, Cluj, Iasi, Timisoara. Head of the Writers’ Union at that time, the late literary critic Laurentiu Ulici liked the idea and supported it. He set up a jury that, for ten years, has been legitimating this award, which has so far been granted to 10 poets. Value has always been the main selection criterion. We have a whole year to pick one poet from among tens of poets who have already published several volumes. Then we try to find out the opinion of people in cultural institutions, publishing houses, high schools and the social media. We centralize the results and together with the Hyperion Cultural Foundation in Botosani we analyze the work of the top ten poets. Five, and in the past two years, seven poets, have their work assessed by a jury whose number of members has also increased. There are seven personalities who nominate the winner. So it’s quite hard to choose the best poet, because there are many talented poets in Romanian literature. It’s impossible to grant awards to all of them. “

Some of the names that have been “recovered,” as poet Gellu Dorian put it, are Gellu Naum, Ana Blandiana, Ştefan Augustin Doinaş, Ileana Mălăncioiu, Dorin Tudoran. Ileana Malanciou, winner of the award at the fifth edition of the event, also came up with the idea of offering an award for best debut. This is why, since 1998, the Ipotesti Memorial in Botosani has granted the “Mihai Eminescu” National Award for Opera Prima. The winners of the 16 editions held so far include Doru Mareş, Liviu Georgescu, Răzvan Ţupa, Dan Sociu and, this year, Ştefan Baghiu. And it was not long ago that literary critic Mircea Martin was wondering; “how long before one of the poets awarded for best debut so far will return to Botoşani to receive the Grand Prize?”

This is also the question that we asked the initiator of the Mihai Eminescu Award, poet Gellu Dorian: “There is no doubt that all the poets that have received this debut prize are rising stars. Some of them have published a lot of books—such is the case with Liviu Georgescu, the winner of the third edition. Indeed, professor Mircea Martin, who has been a member of the jury ever since the beginning, and is also a member of the jury for the debut award, has asked a justified question. We believe that soon enough, probably at the 20th edition or so, we may have a nomination of this kind.”

We remind you that at the 23rd edition, the “Mihai Eminescu” National Poetry Award for lifetime achievement was granted to poet Ion Mureşan, by a jury chaired by Romanian Academy member Nicolae Manolescu and made up of Mircea Martin, Cornel Ungureanu, Ion Pop, Alexandru Cistelecan, Mircea Diaconu and Ioan Holban. Also nominated for the award, apart from Ion Mureşan, were writers Mircea Cărtărescu, Liviu Ioan Stoiciu, Lucian Vasiliu, Constantin Abăluţă, Ovidiu Geraru and Vasile Vlad. The prize, worth 20 thousand lei, as well as the trophy, were handed to Ion Mureşan in a special gala organised during the Mihai Eminescu Days. Just like his predecessors, the winner received the honorary citizenship of Botoşani.

The “Mihai Eminescu” National Poetry Award has been granted every year on January the 15th, the birthday of national poet Mihai Eminescu. Under a law promulgated in December 2010, January the 15th is also the National Culture Day.

“Memoirs from the Ideal Library”, a book by prose writer and mathematician Bogdan Suceava, a professor with the California State University at Fullerton, includes essays focusing on the author’s encounter with mathematics, an encounter that proved key to the author’s subsequent development. The volume was brought out by Polirom Publishers. It is the first piece of writing of this kind Suceava has dedicated to his profession. “I thought of myself as being a problem solver above anything else. It was all clear to me that the most conspicuous expression of intelligence should be the identification of an optimal, specific solution, whether we speak about literature or mathematics”. We asked the author of the novels “The Night Someone Died for You” and “Coming from an Off-Key Time” what a “specific” solution meant in literature.

“If writing a novel is what we have in mind, the solution begins with the narrator’s voice, with the selection of the moment the whole story should come to an end, preparing the reader for a minutely thought-out ending. All that has to do with the literary solution and things can get really complicated, if you get more than one character involved. This time, I had the opportunity of showing how certain things we learn from mathematics end up helping us in other areas of our cultural life as well, mostly in literature.”

Book-mediated encounters with the ideas of long-gone scientists (among whom Huygens, Newton, Meusnier, Euler or Sophie Germain), but also direct encounters with personalities who had a strong bearing on the author’s intellectual progress make the “Memories from the Ideal Library” a volume addressing a wide readership, not just maths-minded people. Also presented in the book is the Bucharest school of geometry, which, the author argues, had developed a very thorough academic programme for more than a century.

It is to this school that Bogdan Suceava owes the early years of his academic background. Gh. Titeica, Dan Barbilian, Nicolae Teodorescu, Solomon Marcus, Ieronim Mihaila, Basarab Nicolescu, are but a few of the Romanian mathematicians to whom Bogdan Suceava pays tribute in his memoirs. “If the purebred mathematicians’ dream is to demonstrate theorems bearing their names, my dream was to be able to fully understand not only certain ideas in mathematics, but also where those ideas stemmed from, their historical affiliation, their progress in time”, Bogdan Suceva writes. Yet what role do mathematicians play in a speed-driven and dismissive world?

“They remind everyone that there are corners in the universe where logic is put to good use. Mathematicians are needed since in this world, we need people capable of avoiding ethical compromises, people who are mindful and lucid, whenever all the others find themselves adrift. People whose questions are so difficult that genuinely authentic intellectual effort is needed to lead you up to a clearly specific answer, where categories are clearly delineated. And in Romania, over the last two decades, everything pretty much boils down to entertainment and frivolity. Yet we can reconsider our past, we can still see what we can still salvage from the public sphere.”

Bogdan Suceava got his BA in Mathematics from the University of Bucharest, as well as the Master’s Degree. He earned his PhD from the Michigan State University, East Lansing, in 2002. Life can be extremely difficult for researchers in Eastern Europe, even after a life devoted to study, Bogdan Suceava thinks. But that can be a challenge for Western researchers as well, some of them being employed on a fixed-term work contract.

“For me it got easier, to the extent that I learned what I had to do. Everything I teach in my course can be found in my book. And that’s what makes the book’s richest autobiographical part. Yet in the book I mentioned a limited number of geometry topics I was in contact with, thanks to the faculty at the University of Bucharest, and later at Michigan State University. To that effect, it is a very subjective book. A history of geometry, from a very personal perspective.”

The volume ”Memoirs from the Ideal Library” brought out as part of the Polirom Publishers’ “Eco-graphies” collection, is also available as an e-book.

“I don’t think there exists a locality around the world with a population of 120 thousand people who can boast their own theatre, which is new, elegant, and provided with state-of-the-art facilities like this one. I will write a message to the International Theatre Institute to report this absolutely unique case”.

This is what Romanian theatre legend, actor Radu Beligan, said about the “Anton Pann “ Theatre based in the southern Romanian town of Ramnicu Valcea. Throughout the years, the theatre enjoyed the presence of famous stage directors such as Silviu Purcarete and Alexandru Dabija.

The Anton Pann theatre was set up in May 1990, being the continuator of 100-year old local theatrical tradition. We recall that between the 1960s and the 1980s the People’s Theatre in Ramnicu Valcea used to be one of Romania’s best amateur theatres. In recent years, two of the best performances staged at the theatre were “Lapusneanul” (Ruling Prince Lapusneanu) directed by Dan Micu and “The Little Square” staged by Silviu Purcarete.

For more than a decade now, the theatre manager has been stage director Adrian Roman, who has pumped a lot of “young blood “ into his theatre. ” For quite a few years now we have been trying to bring young people to the theatre. The “Anton Pann” Theatre has its roots in a people’s theatre, an amateur theatre, and when I took over in 2000 I wanted to turn it into something professional. And I began with the graduates of the drama school in Craiova. Two years ago I contacted the theatre in Cluj and I brought half of the class coached by professor Miklos Bacs, whom I admire as a professor and as a man, as he’s someone who creates a very special attitude in his students. They are not only young actors, they are people with an extraordinary attitude towards work, towards theatre and the stage, which is something I had not previously seen at the other generations working for the Anton Pann Theatre. “

Adrian Roman will next tell us about the directors he brings to the Anton Pann theatre: ”I have been trying to bring over stage directors who are friends of the Anton Pann Theatre and who like to return here. We cannot afford very famous directors as they are more expensive. So we bring friends who like our theatre, because Anton Pann is a wonderful theatre, they work well with the actors; here at Ramnicu Valcea the actors actually live in the theatre, which does not happen in Bucharest for instance, so it’s easier to meet them and work thoroughly. In the summer we also organize workshops, since we can afford to provide accommodation. We also have a very beautiful rooftop terrace and a very beautiful rehearsal room, also on the theatre building’s rooftop. Those who came here saw all that and promised to come back with interesting projects. We are trying to create a strong team capable of taking the theatre towards a certain direction. “

Adrian Roman will tell us about the direction the Anton Pann theatre is now heading towards: ”We mainly rely on a young public. A team of young actors draws a young audience. We could see that for ourselves. They are also more open and more mobile, since mobility is something crucial outside Bucharest, where people are a bit more sluggish. And they learned that the Anton Pann Theatre has a good team that stages good shows. People of a certain age choose those shows featuring great, famous actors. But we are now forming an audience. We also have an animation theatre team which puts up shows for children.”

One of the theatre directors who is very fond of the Anton Pann Theater is Cristi Juncu. He staged, for the first time in the 2013-2014 theater season, a deeply emotional show entitled “The Belgrade Trilogy”, by Biljana Srbljanovic, about the life of immigrants in Prague, Sidney and Los Angeles. The 10 very young actors of the theatre company have been cast in the show. One of them is Vlad Birzanu, who graduated last year from the “Babes-Bolyai” University in Cluj-Napoca, the class of Miriam Cuibus. Vlad Birzanu has been nominated for the UNITER Awards (the Prizes of the Theatres’ Union in Romania), the debut category, for the role of Flaut, in the show “A midsummer night’s dream”, staged by Botos Bálint at the Anton Pann Theatre.

At a time when young actors have no many other choices than becoming independent actors, Vlad Bârzanu prefers the status of employed actor. “It is true that there is such a tendency, but I am very satisfied with my status, because first of all I belong to a team that I like and which I knew even before coming here, because most actors are former colleagues of mine. Furthermore, it’s very good to have a safe job nowadays, when many new actors graduate every year, without having the slightest idea of where to start from. When somebody tells you: look, I’ve seen you on stage and I would like you to come to my theatre, you say ‘wow! Of course, I’ll come!’ It is very good for me to have a certain amount of certainty, I am near Bucharest, I can go to school to take my MA degree. Things are going very well.”

Both on a comical and a dramatic note, the “Belgrade Trilogy” dwells on the challenges and difficulties youngsters are facing, in their effort to get integrated into their countries of adoption.

The Anton Pann Theatre in Ramnicu Valcea managed to have its own building on September 25th 2009, a historic day when the first theatre building, designed, built and equipped like a professional theatre opened its doors in Valcea County. The building is made up of two halls, an exterior amphitheatre, a rehearsals room, a terrace and accommodation facilities. In brief the building housing the Anton Pann Theatre is one of the most modern and functional theatre buildings in Romania.

The inaugural evening of the Bucharest International Literature Festival, an early December event hosted by the Peasant Club in Bucharest, started off from one of Israeli writer Zeruya Shalev’s novels, “Husband and Wife”, a book whose Romanian version was brought out by the Polirom Publishers. “Noted for her debut novel, Love Life, Israeli native Shalev plays confidently with the themes of jealousy, accumulated grievances, and resentments,” Library Journal writes.

The Publishers Weekly also makes mention of Zeruya Shalev’s performance. ”Shalev has created a novel entirely devoid of standard dialogue, choosing instead to convey snatches of conversation, arguments and whispers of love in stream-of-consciousness prose.” In the novel, characters Udi and Naama are two people who had been growing side by side, yet somewhere along their journey communication between them seems to have broken down, and their life together, jointly with their daughter Noga is now torn by jealousy, fury and guilt. Little by little it turns out that the entire foundation their marriage had been built upon was a very frail one, and the image of their idyllic teenage love was just an illuson.

The four guests in the Festival, two writers couples, Zeruya Shalev and Ayal Megged from Israel and Cecilia Stefanescu and Florin Iaru from Romania, respectively, were actually asked, among other things, why being unhappy has a more powerful creative potential than being happy. It was also a couple who moderated the discussion, poet Adela Greceanu and journalist Matei Martin. Zeruya Shalev explained why being unhappy is more productive than being happy, when it comes to writing.

In writer Cecilia Stefanescus books being unhappy seems to be more frequent than being happy. “Dramatic situations engender conflict and enjoy diving into these conflicts. Unhappy circumstances force you to take out all your masks. I did not give up on all my illusions, but I did let go of the illusion that happiness lasts. Happiness is a split second, it does not last. We would become unhealthy, we would suffer terribly if we were happy forever.”

Writer Florin Iaru shares that opinion. In writing, being unhappy is more productive than being happy. “It’s a matter of grammar. In grammar, happiness is restrictive, it only has adjectives, it only has qualities. We pursue happiness, whatever the costs. However, happiness is static, it lacks conflict, so it cannot possibly develop a dramatic nucleus. Secondly, readers are consumers of unhappiness. It makes them happy, it gives them aesthetic satisfaction. So if readers look for unhappiness, writing about it pays off, and authors know that all to well.”

The talk further developed into no less interesting questions. What are the advantages of a marriage between writers? To what extent is there admiration, to what extent is there understanding, how much of that is competition or envy, in a couple where both members are writers? What traumas can literature bring to a marriage?

The Bucharest International Literature Festival gave literature lovers from Bucharest the opportunity to meet notable personalities in European literature today, coming from countries such as Great Britain, Israel, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia, Jamaica and Romania.

In 2007, stage director Andrei Serban jointly with Corina Suteu, the then director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, launched a series of theatre workshops addressing the youth in particular. The series was held under the title “The Travelling Academy”. Workshops were open not only to actors, stage directors, art directors or musicians, but also to “people who are young at heart from various walks of life”. Earlier this month the Nemira Publishers launched a volume entitled “The Andrei Serban Travelling Academy — the Book of Workshops”, coordinated by theatre critic Monica Andronescu with Cristiana Gavrila. Here is what Monica Andronescu told the book launch conference:

“I believe this volume is unique in Romania. We needed such a book, we needed someone to document this unique and extraordinary phenomenon”.

The book brought out by Nemira Publishers reconstructs the “mysterious” image of Andrei Serban’s Academy. In turn, the stage director himself tried to unravel this mystery.

“What are we missing? What do we need? Such questions were the underlying source of these activities. We work with different forms and directions, some in theatre, others in other fields. But each and every one of us lacks something or needs something. At the same time, we all relate to this search for something. The workshops were a form of escaping, for all of us who attended. Just like the characters from “As you like it”, who leave town, heading to the woods due to the unbearable pressure of society”.

The workshops held so far as part of the Travelling Academy took place in Plopi, Horezu, Ipotesti and Mogosoaia. Each had its own focus. The first workshop was centred on Tatiana Niculescu Bran’s fiction novel “Deadly Confession,” which was also staged at the famous “La MaMa” Theatre in New York.

“The first workshop, in the Apuseni Mountains, was an attempt to see how we can meet, how we can bring together people who didn’t know each other, actors, musicians, fine artists, writers. We lived together for 10 days, seeing if we could discover something. In this case, we had Tatiana Niculescu’s book, which we tried to see if we could live ourselves. The second workshop, in Horezu, was based on Brancusi’s life and work. Many of the actors did not know each other, but became a family. We met very early in the morning for practice. At noon we all had lunch together, this was a feature of every workshop. We all sat together, and instead of forming small groups, we all had to pay attention to everyone else, to passing the salad bowl around, we had to notice when someone was asking for bread, when they were running out of water in their glass… The idea was to not eat just for myself, to not eat with my usual greediness, but to eat more calmly and with more respect towards peers.”

In the workshop in Ipotesti the center of attention was Eminescu, while in Mogosoaia the protagonists were Caragiale and Shakespeare. It is fairly difficult to grasp the essence of these meetings in one book. Monica Andronescu explained how she designed the volume called “The Andrei Serban Travelling Academy – the Book of Workshops:

“The book is made up of testimonies, tales from the field, interviews and essays. I believe that once you read that book, you know there is a school there, teaching you how to live, how to live in theatre, and how to do theatre. I believe this is very important. How did I lay out my texts? I tried to have Andrei Serban speak in the introduction, to tell us what this academy meant, what it meant for him. Then there is the text written by Corina Suteu, to whom we owe the book, because if it hadn’t been for her these workshops would not have existed. Then we put in the foreground the Travelling Academy, which had a different destiny, it was designed based on a book by Tatiana Niculescu-Bran, ‘The Tanacu Confession’. Then there were the testimonies of the people who participated in the workshops in Horezu, Mogosoaia and Ipotesti. The book ends with another text by Andrei Serban which will certainly impress readers.”

A testimony in the book belongs to actor Marius Manole, who also attended the book launch:

“I met Andrei Serban in Horezu, at a workshop that personally I will never forget. It was one of the most beautiful moments I have experienced in my entire career in Romanian theatre. It may sound like big words, but the workshop in Horezu was a true revelation to me. Because I had started to lose confidence in theatre, since things were not happening the way I wanted. In Horezu I met some very talented, great actors from Romania and we realized that a good actor has a fantastic potential and efficiency, that we can wake up very early in the morning and work until late at night if we are interested in what we’re doing, we realized that a show can be made in 5-6 days, that our imagination knows no boundaries, and that there must be someone who knows how to put our potential to good use, to understand us and make us thrive…because I will never again believe that a bad show is to be blamed on the actor.”

We end with the words of director Andrei Serban, who will tell us about the essence of the Travelling Academy:

“These workshops can be an inspiration for the young at heart to move one step forward. It’s the path towards a new type of education which none of us benefited from before. These workshops are a wake up call. Matisse used to say that art was a comfortable armchair. In other words it’s addictive. It has every chance to make you fall asleep, become passive. Unfortunately theatre today continues to have this soporific effect, with several exceptions of course. That’s why we need to escape!”

Temps D’Images is French for “time of images”, but the festival itself is more about the image of our times. It brings together representations of theatre, dance and visual arts in an event revolving around the social role of art. Miki Braniste, the head of the CollectivA Association and the director of the Temps Dd’Images festival told us more:

“The festival started slightly differently in 2008 and I feel the direction it has been taking so far had its progress in time. It took three editions for us were to be able to realize where we stood exactly. In 2011 I had a revelation. I was very impressed by the social movements that started in the Arab world, for instance. And it dawned upon me that these are important times we are living, and that the changes which occurred there would have a strong bearing on history as such, from now on. And what we do, through the artists we invite in the festival, should mirror that moment, which is one of utmost importance for our future. And that is why the topics we’ve started tackling have a lot more to do with the social dimension, with the economic and political changes that take their toll on us all. I believe art can bring in a new perspective on what we usually view as being a Sisyphean toil.”

Held in Cluj in the first half of November, the festal has now reached its 6th edition, Yet its history is older, and with truly European origins. It was jointly set up in 2002 by the ARTE TV Channel, La Ferme du Buisson, the Marne and La Valee National Stage in France. The TEMPS D’IMAGES project, which is a dance and photo/video image festival, developed at European level since it has so far been held in ten countries: Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Turkey.

Each edition of the festival’s Romanian version brought in a different topic, one of social inspiration. And those topics do have their running thread. With details on that, here is Miki Braniste again.

“If last year we spoke about the future, this year we speak about solidarity as the talks we had with the public and the artists in the previous edition made us realize there is nothing we can do in this world all by ourselves, we need to be together with others. I for one realize we need to search even beyond the mere concept of solidarity so that we can see the reasons why we need to show solidarity. I would love, for instance, to invite artists from Japan, which is now confronted with environment-related problems. I believe that an ecology-oriented range of themes, so rarely tackled in art, will from now on be a very important topic for all of us.”

Therefore, at this year’s edition of the Temps d’Images Festival, the theme of solidarity echoed in all the events, one way or another. Director Miki Braniste told us how:

“We had a lot of debates, attended by Romanian and foreign artists, foreign festival producers, festival directors, etc. Even though each of them was describing the situation they had back home, we realized that this is a global problem, and that we all need solidarity. It is a topic of concern for the audience as well, which provided us with a lot of feedback. There was a need to communicate with one another, it was as if time was never enough at the debates. We can continue these debates after the festival as well, here in Cluj, trying to see what solutions we can find, and how to get people more involved as citizens.”

Solidarity was also the topic for the dance show called ‘Parallel’, created by Ferenc Sinko and Leta Popescu, performed by Lucia Marneanu and Kata Bodoki-Halmen, one of the shows that impressed theater critic Oana Stoica the most:

“This is a performance that starts off as contemporary dance and ends as a theater play. It is a show concerned with gender identity, more to the point lesbianism, and faces off the way in which men and women look at each other, and the way in which society evolves in bias clichés. In fact, it talks about the clichés through which we see the other, from sensuality to sexuality, every kind of difference. It is a very strong show, with two artists with a ver y specific kind of acting, different from what happens on stage elsewhere in Romania. They integrate dance and text, which is poetic and social at once, and at the same time physical. The two girls who perform in parallel in different spaces go throughout the show from a female identity to a male identity. That happens in a traumatic way at some point. For instance, binding their breasts with sticky tape to suppress femininity is a brutal image, very shocking for the viewer.”

Theatre critic Oana Stoica said that the selection of shows for the Temps d’Image Festival was “extremely focused on the specificities of Romanian theater nowadays, texts with strong social involvement, extracted from everyday reality”. Her impression of the festival summarizes very well what is special about the Temps d’Image Festival and why the community continues to need this festival:

“The way in which social issues reflect in art is interrogative, in that the artist raises issues and points to flaws in society. They raise issues, not necessarily coming up with solutions. Because it is not the artist’s job to provide them, his job is to show us the wound. I believe the public needs this, because they recognize themselves in a verbalized form, in a way they may not have thought to express things. I believe that art, theater in Romania should speak more and more about the problems that people have today, and do it less through metaphor, and more in a direct fashion.”

One of the most highly acclaimed Romanian pianists of his generation, the piano soloist of Radio Romania’s Choirs and Orchestras Horia Mihail took part in the International Classical Music Festival held in Ushuaia, Argentina, in mid-October. Mihail performed pieces included in the program of the “Traveling Piano” national tournament, organized jointly by Radio Romania’s Culture Channel and the Accendo Cultural Association.

Horia Mihail studied the piano at the Music Academy in Bucharest, under the supervision of Constantin Ionescu-Vovu. After 14 years of study in Romania, Horia Mihail furthered his education at the University of Illinois in the United States of America, where he studied with Ian Hobson. In 1995 Mihail got his BA and his Master’s degree. In 1999 Horia Mihail also got an “Artist’s Diploma” from Boston University, where he studied with Anthony di Bonaventura.

As the soloist of Radio Romania’s Orchestras and Choirs, Horia Mihail has given a great number of concerts and recitals at Radio Romania’s Concert Hall in Bucharest. He has also worked with classical music orchestras across the country, and has taken tours in Romania or abroad.

Throughout his career, Mihail has given more than 2,000 recitals and concerts in 18 countries on all continents. In recent years, Horia Mihail has initiated several large-scale projects, with a clear cultural and social impact, such as “The Traveling Piano”, “The Golden Flute”, “George Enescu’s Violin in the Countryside” and “The Duel of Violins”.

The Romanian pianist’s participation in the Festival in Ushuaia, Argentina, on October 15th, was sponsored by the Romanian Cultural Institute, the Romanian Embassy in Buenos Aires and Radio Romania. Here is what Horia Mihail told us before leaving for Argentina:

“It is for the first time that I’ll be crossing the Equator. I’ll have a solo recital in Buenos Aires, then fly for a few hours to get to the world’s southernmost city, Ushuaia, which hosts a Beethoven Festival. The programme I’ve been playing in Romania for so long will thus be heard by music lovers at the end of the world, and this is great. It will be a beautiful journey and I hope I’ll come back with wonderful stories.”

The International Classical Music Festival in Ushuaia, held between October 5th and 19th, reached its 9th edition this year. Here are Horia Mihail’s first impressions of his journey:

“It was an absolutely unbelievable landscape, although the cold did affect my voice a little. The concerts were a success, and I’d like to mention the audience here, they are quite loud, not during the performances as such, but while applauding. They behave as I imagine the opera audience used to do 100-150 years ago.”

Prior to the concert in Ushuaia, Horia Mihail performed in Buenos Aires, in the Chamber Salon of the “Usina del Arte” Cultural Center, an important cultural landmark for the Argentinean capital. Here is Horia Mihail again

“In Buenos Aires I played in a relatively new location, called Usina del Arte, a complex that comprises two concert halls, exhibition areas, many other cultural attractions, and built inside a former industrial complex. I played in one of the concert halls there, and I was quite surprised to see that 300-seat hall full of people. I met some of the few members of the Romanian community in Argentina, but most of the audience was made up of Argentineans. Last night I performed in Ushuaia, at the end of the world, as they like to call this place. The star of this year’s edition of the Festival was Beethoven, and this perfectly matched my programme, because I play the same pieces as part of the ‘Traveling Piano’ project. These days, all Beethoven’s symphonies have been played in Ushuaia, in front of audiences ranging between 300 and 7 thousand people, which is quite a lot considering that the town has a population of around 60,000 people.”

Pianist Horia Mihail is also the president of the Accendo Cultural Association, which organizes five MusicON tours with the Romanian Piano Trio, three Stradivarius tours and, jointly with Radio Romania, the national tours “The Traveling Piano” and “The Duel of Violins: Stradivarius vs. Guarnieri.” Horia Mihail was recently in Chisinau, for a concert devoted to the 100th anniversary of the Polish musician Witold Lutoslawski.

The first edition of the International Literature and Translation Festival (FILIT), held at the end of October in the city of Iasi, in northeastern Romania, enjoyed the participation of 200 writers and of over 12,000 spectators. The Festival gathered in Iasi great names of the contemporary literature as well as renowned translators. Passionate readers had the opportunity to learn how novels are written, how one can make a living out of writing and how one can become a successful translator.

The International Literature and Translation Festival proved, from its first edition, that it can safely be counted among the world’s top cultural events, something confirmed by Ulrich Schreiber, the founder and director of the Berlin International Literature Festival, one of the most prestigious cultural events in Europe. “The public has been extraordinary and that took international press a little bit by surprise. Nobody has imagined that Iasi, a city they never heard of before, can host such an event. I must admit I was surprised too, the festival’s manager, writer Dan Lungu said on the last night of the event.

Dan Lungu: “In short, the event exceeded my expectations, in the sense that institutions, the public, and the press highly supported the festival. This is a professional festival; it has ambitious goals and enjoys the participation of many people. I can safely say that the Iasi International Literature and Translation Festival is by no means lower in standards than the important festivals in Europe.”

Writer Florina Ilis:

Florina Ilis: “On the second day of the festival I had a meeting with the students of the Mihai Eminescu National College, and in Pascani I held a reading and Q&A session with students, in which writer Radu Pavel Gheo also took part. Of course, I participated in all the other events, I wanted to make it to as many as possible, because there were plenty to choose from and all of them were very well organized.”

Poet Mircea Dinescu also took part in the Iasi Literature and Translation Festival :

Mircea Dinescu: “It was nice, there were a lot of people and they responded to what I was reading. Usually these meetings are rather boring, but this one was quite funny. There are various kinds of poems, some of them are appropriate for public readings, and others should only be read at home, alone. So it’s a good thing that the guests included poets who were quite different from each other, both in terms of personality and writing style.”

Writer Adriana Bittel said:

Adriana Bittel: “I find it a great success thanks both to the quality of guest writers and to the unexpectedly high interest of the public. It was extraordinary for me to see a public made up of hundreds of people of all age categories interested in meeting the writers whose books they read. For a writer, the greatest satisfaction is to see that people are interested in his or her work. The organizers of the festival did a great job, I was very happy”.

Since young people were the focus of the festival, it’s them who had the last say: a jury made up of 20 students, representing the top highs schools of Iasi voted the “Most endeared book of 2012”. The prize, worth 3,500 lei, went to the novel “Omar the blind” written by Daniela Zeca and published by the Polirom publishers. The project was initiated by the Iasi County School Inspectorate. The other novels nominated for the “Most endeared book of 2012” prize were: “The brown eye of our love” by Mircea Cartarescu published by the Humanitas publishers, “Luiza Textoris” by Corin Braga released by the Polirom publishing house, “The genocide chronicles” by Radu Aldulescu issued by the Cartea Romaneasca publishers and “All the owls” by Filip Florian released by Polirom.

“The International Literature and Translation Festival is held because Romanian literature deserves it. It’s a very good period for the books of Romanian writers as well as for the films produced by Romanian directors, despite the economically unfavorable period” said Jan Willem Bos, a translator from the Netherlands. Translator Laure Hinckel from France also praised the festival quality: “The existence of this festival is salutary. It is held in the countryside, without any support from the center, it’s a festival with many volunteers and programs tailored to the recipients, to the readers, to the young people”.

The production that opened the 23rd National Theater Festival in Bucharest, with the largest number of shows, was Andrei Serban’s The Trojan Women, by Euripides. Serban premiered the piece at the LaMaMa theater in New York, in 1974. In 1990, he brought it to Bucharest as part of his “Ancient Trilogy”, which was a genuine rebirth of Romanian theater. In 2012, Andrei Serban reinvented “The Trojan Women” with the Iasi National Opera. The director himself told us why:

“Beatrice Rancea, appointed as director of the Iasi Opera, was in 1990 a member of the National Theater team, where the “Ancient Trilogy” was first staged. She had this nostalgia of the trilogy, and she wanted it to be resumed. Why the opera? Because “The Trojan Women” is a sort of opera, acted and sung by actors. This time they are professional opera singers — the soloists and choir of the Iasi Opera, who were delighted to have an experience different from what you usually see. It was also an experience for the younger audience, since the people who are now 20 were not even born in 1990. Some of them study in schools what the Trilogy meant, both here and in the US, it is part of the history of theater, but they haven’t seen it. And if they have a possibility of seeing it, of course it is a real experience, and a form of education for the younger audience, and I felt an obligation towards them to rebuild this show.”

Moreover, Andrei Serban believes that the production “The Trojan Women” does have a place in the present social context.

“A tragedy written 2,500 years ago is universally valid. I believe that in any time of tension, at any moment, we can find references to what happens on stage, to what prison and freedom mean in a social context, and what prison and freedom mean from a purely human point of view — there is a prison within us, and a yearning for freedom. These two words are extremely visible in the show, and the spectators who saw the show 20 years ago and came back told me, to my joy, that it had the same strength, the same vitality and freshness as back then.”

The audience of the 2013 edition of the National Theater Festival, which concluded on 3 November, could also see the show that will represent Romania at the 2014 Avignon Festival, as part of the 2014 season of the Brussels National Theater. The show ‘Solitarity’ by Gianina Carbunariu is a production of the Radu Stanca National Theater of Sibiu and the National Theater of the French Community in Brussels, in conjunction with the 2014 Avignon Theater Festival, as part of the European project Cities on Stage.

“Solitarity” is inspired by Romanian reality, but these symbols can be found, in one form or another, anywhere this century. Here is Gianina Carbunariu talking about it:

“There are local symbols here, but I believe that the whole world today faces the same problems. They are global: nationalism, rigidity in traditional values, identity issues. I believe that these local symbols speak internationally. I didn’t want to necessarily depict Romania. I wanted to make a show starting from things I know. It seems to me that this entire problem of nationalism comes from a desire to affirm an identity, sometimes too strongly and in a manner that bothers, to affirm it aggressively, which is a losing formula in the short, medium and long term. What I was interested in more was the lack of solidarity, and not only in Romania. Because of the economic crisis, there is this idea of ‘every man for himself’, whether it is expressed or not. It’s always been like that, but the crisis has just made it worse. I want to bring up questions for the audience, for me and for the actors: Why are we incapable of showing solidarity? Why are we unable to obtain things together? Why are moments of solidarity so rare? Because they do exist. But it takes us too long to realize that we do things if we join forces at some point.”

The ‘Actors in the Foreground’ section of the national festival also included an unforgettable show, at least as the text goes. It is an extremely realistically written life story. ‘Illusions’ was written by contemporary Russian drama writer Ivan Vyrypaiev. It was directed by Cristi Juncu, and is a challenge and an opportunity for any actor.

We asked Andi Vasluianu, who is part of the cast, about his experience with that text:

“When Cristi Juncu called me in for a reading, it was a very emotional experience, but at the same time I told him that I found it terribly difficult. Not just as an actor. I asked myself a lot of things regarding the audience, especially how prepared they were to receive it. This piece has very much to do with the audience. When it comes to other types of text, it has very much to do with the actors or with directing, but in this case it has very much to do with the ability of the audience to join the story. What really got me emotional about this text was the illusion of life. It was how many times we fall into this illusion, how many times we have the feeling that we know what things are all about, when in fact a single phrase could change our life. This is what this text is: some people’s lives get changed by a simple small phrase. This is what fascinated me when it comes to this text: it is extremely similar to us. How we are, what we do, and how many illusions we have.”

At the closing ceremony of the festival, organized by UNITER — the Theatre Union in Romania – between October 25 and November 3, the International Association of Theater Critics granted the Theater of Tomorrow Award to the production “A Streetcar Named Desire”, by Tennessee Williams, directed by Andrei and Andreea Grosu. The three members of the jury, from Romania, Serbia and Canada, said they granted the award to that piece due to its original staging, the ingenious use of space in a ‘less means more’ approach, the refined acting, and the subtle art of creating relations on stage.

The plays competing there were from five countries, France, Serbia, Bulgaria, Austria and Romania, illustrating all types of crises: economic, social, political, sexual, as well as identity crisis. The winner was Candid, a loose adaptation of Voltaire’s work, directed by Cristian Pepino, a puppet theater for grownups premiering in 2007 at Tandarica Theater, the foremost puppet theater in Romania.

The youngest member of the jury, Radu Alexandru Nica, told us about why it won: “First and foremost, as far as the jury was concerned, the artistic value was what tipped the scales. It was a rather cheeky show. I am delighted that they did with the puppets what I would have liked to do, to treat them violently, with humor and cynicism. This black humor thing is what excited the jury, this kind of lucid approach to this Illuminist text. This unbounded imagination of the director and actors won us over completely. What do I mean by a ‘cheeky’ play? It is a show that challenges morals, and one that shows us our stupid and grotesque side. And not just that, it was also the way in which the puppets were handled, the combination of video and puppet handling, between choreography and acting, which was rather cynical.”

One other show that competed there was from Vienna, put on by a Romanian director, the play “Woyzeck”, by Geirun Tino, played at Pygmalion Theater. A native of Braila, Geirun Tino settled in Vienna in 1985, and ten years later he set up his own theater, the Pygmalion. This year, the artist got Vienna’s Gold Cross Award for Culture in Theater. The famous play Woyzeck, by Georg Buchner, is one of the most widely played productions in the German speaking area.

Geirun Tino told us about his vision of the text: “Woyzeck is the first hero in world drama that is a kind of an anti-hero. Up until Woyzeck, most of the protagonists in drama were nobles, kings, emperors… Woyzeck is the first wastrel, a nobody, a man without a firmly drawn personality, without a well defined social situation. I was interested to see to what extent such a man can develop the same appetite for love of peers, for love in general. Is there anything different in the way that such a man loves others? And we see that there is no difference. And if in this area there is no difference, then the other areas no longer count at all.”

The Festin on the Boulevard festival opened with an original event called “Theater on a Slice of Bread”. The initiative belongs to director Mihai Lungeanu, and his purpose was to draw the attention of passers by to theater.

At the end of the festival, critic Marinela Tepus, director of Nottara Theater, said she wanted to take these meetings with the audience beyond the stage: “I think the sense of a festival is to bring together as many quality shows as it can, from anywhere in the world. My biggest wish is for both sections to include as many shows as it can, making a real street event out of it, not limited to the sidewalk in front of the theater, but crossing the street, and even getting to the Historical Center, following in the footsteps of the festival “Caragiale’s Bucharest”, initiated by Bucharest City Hall, all summer long. It concludes on 15 September, and we begin on 15 October, so we are basically taking over from this festival. Because the weather is fair in October, we could gather people together to come and stay for a while, so we could be closer to the community, because a festival is a feast for the community.”

Nottara Theater will now officially have a Boulevard of Comedy section permanently. The main hall of the theater will now be a constant Boulevard of Comedy, with only comical theater being staged there, as Nottara wishes to tell everyone that comedy is not a minor genre.

Corneliu Porumboiu’s most recent film, very much like his previous production, Policeman, adjective”, created a divide between cinemagoers. On the one side are those who believe that the story, in its classical sense, is something a film simply cannot do without, while on the other side, there are those who favor a less narrative kind of cinema. Film critic Tudor Caranfil, right after the screening, thought Corneliu Porumboiu’s new feature film “When the Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism” was “a challenge”, “the most passionate experimental film in Romanian cinematography”. His younger colleague Andrei Gorzo thought the film was a hyper-subtle anti-romance.” The story goes as follows: work is well under way for a production authored by film director Paul (Bogdan Dumitrache) As he is about to shoot a naked scene, Paul talks to Alina ( Diana Avramut) the actress with whom he’s having an affair, with the producer of the film ( Mihaela Sarbu) with a fellow filmmaker ( Alexandru Papadopol) and with a physician who examines his endoscopy. The film is made of 17 scenes only, most of which are static.

Filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu has said in an interview that his intention was to speak about the birth of a film and the constraints that go with it. Here is Corneliu Porumboiu himself.

“I was keen on the relationship between characters and the story as such. The idea crossed my mind about three years ago, when a new cinematography law was passed, whereby submissions for the open competition for financing from the National Cinematography Center was a director’s cut. And that brought back memories of my student days, from the very moment I took up filmmaking, since in school I always lived with some sort of limitation. And then I recalled that back then I also had a director’s cut I made at home, all by myself, timing the frames. And it is from those recollections that this film started off. And it’s just as obvious that the film also includes an interrogation on the way I started making films.”

“I was brought up within the confines of the 35 millimeters film, of the dire need to plan each and every frame. It was because of such constraints that my inclination for repetitions and longer frames sort of developed”, Porumboiu also said, recalling his early years as a filmmaker.

” The screenplay had seven versions. I wrote it with nostalgia for celluloid film, I wanted it to work like some sort of inward mirror and I was less interested in what my characters did, since you could find that out for yourself along the way. “When Evening Falls on Bucharest” is also a state of mind, a time of day we don’t get to see in the movie, a kind of poetry working off-beat in its relationship with “ metabolism”. The title is somehow tied to the way in which I see this job”.

Playing the director’s part is Bogdan Dumitrache, who also played the lead role in “Child’s Pose”, a Romanian production that scooped the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlinale. Speaking now is Bogdan Dumitrache, about how the shooting came along in “ When Evening Falls on Bucharest.”

” It was a quest we undertook together. It was a time when I felt I was deeply involved in a project in which we were doing our search together, and whenever we found things that worked, we inserted them in our film. We had lots of converstions. It was a month of rehearsals when we talked it all over and there were no directions in the classical sense. We knew the script, but we kept rewriting it as we rehearsed the parts. We had enough time to take in and enrich the characters.”

Here is now film critic Magda Mihailescu speaking about “ When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism”

“The fascination of the film comes from the very way in which the magic dispels after filming on the set. There is, however, something that all these films about film making have in common. The filmmaker is a lonely man. The main character, the director, although he has an affair with an actress, is still a lonely man. And that’s how the character in Francois Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine was like, and there’s also something similar about Alexandru Tatos’s Sequences. You can see that in the way he walks, in how he smokes, in his entire behavior”.

“When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism”, Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s third feature film (after “East of Bucharest” and ”Policeman, Adjective”) has already been short listed for the international film festival competitions in Locarno, Sarajevo, Toronto and New York. With “East of Bucharest” a production that won the Camera d’Or in 2006, Porumboiu earned his reputation as a director and screenplay writer with a good ear for dialogue and an interest in the vast ramifications of truth”, according to Variety magazine.

Attila Vizauer, the editor-in-chief of Radio Romania’s drama department explains: “It’s a tribute to the people who, in 1928 and 1929 had the courage to innovate and create a new means of mass communication and a new genre, namely radio drama.”

In those early days, radio plays were produced and aired live before a live audience. It all happened in the big radio concert hall, which brought together actors, sound engineers and the audience. As a tribute to those times, an adaptation of the play “What the Village Knew”, now called “What the City Knows”, was staged at the Comedy Theatre in Bucharest before a large audience. Here’s the director of the play, Mihai Lungeanu, speaking about this “visual” encounter of the public with radio drama:

Mihai Lungeanu: “The spectator, participating in the theater act, is faced with a sort of chemistry, which cannot be found just anywhere, because one never knows what happens in the studio. We tried to bring some of that atmosphere of creation, of improvisation that we build in the recording studio, in a way to reproduce the energy of those who 85 years ago, for the first time read out a play that reached the audience as a type of radio drama. It was for the first time that the listener was faced with just voices representing characters, feelings, a moral, stories told right into the microphone, unmitigated, without alternate takes, without being able to fix errors or to enrich the message in any way.”

The first Grand Prix Nova Radio Drama Festival was organized by Radio Romania in Bucharest between September 30 and October 5, and its theme was innovation in radio drama. It was held under the high patronage of Crown Princess Margareta of Romania, and it was scheduled to coincide with the 85th anniversary of Radio Romania.

Attila Vizauer, the head of Radio Romania’s radio drama department said he was pleasantly surprised at how successful the festival was. Here is Attila Vizauer telling us more about it: “Each step of making this festival has been an adventure, but one which ended on a happy note. After we had designed the project, we were green lighted by the board of Radio Romania. In the following stage we selected Europe’s most important radio drama professionals and we invited them to sit on the jury of this festival. We had the great pleasure of receiving enthusiastic answers. The next stage was registration. The answers were timid at first. The first entry was a piece from Vietnam, then one from Ukraine. Little by little, we had more, and we had to extend the registration deadline by 15 days, in order to be able to include everyone. We had 25 production companies from 22 countries, with 56 shows, and that was after the preliminary selection. Then came the festival. The applicants sent not only their materials, they came here in person, they were present at every audition, at every debate. We had meetings to debate the shows, the themes that the festival planned on promoting. We discussed the role of innovation in the field of radio drama, the trends in this art genre, all of these were topics debated as part of the festival.”

The jury, made up of renowned professionals, was presided by Nils Heyerdhal, chair of the Norwegian Academy for Language and Literature and former head of the Radio Drama Department with Norway’s public radio.

Here is Nils Heyerdhal with details on the festival in Bucharest: ”What strikes me for instance is that many of the producers and the radio stations try to distribute the radio plays in new ways, not only through radio but through the Internet, opening to social media, talking about the products, getting groups form on the Internet and so forth. Of course that’s a new way of distributing our work and of course there we will meet young people. Well, because radio drama is a rather new genre, it was born with the radio in the 1920s. It has its old roots, but it is more known to older audience, who, when they were children they used to listen to radio, to radio plays, but then came television and took over. And so, the new generation do not have the same connection to our craft. So, we have to try to catch them. And of course it has to do with the content of the plays we are producing, but it also has to do with the form. We need shorter formats; older people are used to sit down and listen for a quarter of an hour or more than that to a play, but the tempo of younger people isn’t ike that. So, I think one of the new ways must be to try to make smaller productions, for instance series of ten, fifteen minutes, catching the new audience. That means the authors or the playwrights have to think them in other way. Not doing like Ibsen or Chekov…I mean playing for two hours or two and a half hours. You have to make themin smaller formats to adapt to what is more familiar for the young ones.”

Such tendencies have also been identified in Attila Vizauer’s play, ”Oh Dad, Poor Dad’, a Radio Romania production that ranked second in the Short Drama Section.

Attila Vizauer: ”I relied heavily on Petre Barbu’s text, on my directing skills and on the professionalism of sound director Mihnea Chelaru and music director Madalin Cristescu, but didn’t even dream of an award though.That wasn’t part of our mission as we were only focused on staging the festival in the best possible manner. The fact that we also got an award is a true joy and a gift.”

Nils Heyerdal, president of the jury of the Grand Prix Nova’s first edition has voiced hope that the Romanian public radio will continue to stage such events: ”I think it’s very important the Romanian radio invites to a new festival, where professionals can meet and discuss things like that. Of course, what we discuss very much is the future, how shall we attract new audiences, how shall we be relevant for the young ones.”