Romania's new wave is riding high

"Intense realism": A scene from The Death of Mr Lazarescu. Photograph: Tartan Films

Last week, I was invited among 10 foreign guests to Bucharest to take part in a round table discussion on "Romanian Films Today", generously hosted by the Romanian Film Critics Association. It was held in a conference room packed with enthusiastic Romanian filmmakers and critics eager to hear what we had to say. Suddenly, or at least since 2005, after the breakthrough with Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu, we had all become "experts" on Romanian cinema. Most of us could even pronounce the names of the directors correctly.

The Death of Mr Lazarescu launched the "Romanian new wave". Yet, as Jay Weissberg of Variety recalled, critics were walking out in droves of the first screenings in Cannes. It was not until a minority of perceptive critics, like Weissberg, wrote glowing reviews and it won the prestigious Un Certain Regard at Cannes and dozens of other awards, that the sluggish critics started to wake up to its qualities.

This was typical of reviewers who have preconceptions about movies. How could a 153-minute Romanian film about a dying man be any good? Despite this success, and other Romanian films since Mr Lazarescu, such as Catalin Mitulescu's The Way I Spent The End of The World, Corneliu Porumboiu's 12.08 East of Bucharest, Radu Muntean's The Paper Will Be Blue and Ruxandra Zenide's Ryna, critics were walking around Cannes last year referring to Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days as "that Romanian film", as if it were some weird phenomenon.

In fact, Costel Safirman, a Romanian-born Israeli film historian, reminded us of the history of Romanian cinema and that Liviu Ciulei's Forest of the Hanged (1965) won Best Director at Cannes, the year that Lucian Pintilie, the best-known Romanian director, made his very first feature, Sunday at Six. There was much pleasure and some surprise when 4 Months won the Palme d'Or last year, beating "that American film" and others. One wonders if the film had not won the award whether we would have been sitting there having the discussion. Not surprisingly, the dull-witted selectors of the Academy Award for Foreign Language Films did not even nominate 4 Months. As Scott Foundas, the critic for LA Weekly, and a participant at the round table wrote: "How Do You Say 'Oscar Scandal' in Romanian?"

It took 16 years after the death of Ceausescu, the Communist despot who had controlled the arts with an iron fist, for the directors, mostly in their thirties, to be able to break with the epoch before 1989 when, because of censorship, films had to use all sorts of metaphors to get by. Although several of the new wave films can be taken as metaphors of Romanian society, they are, at the same time, almost documentary-like observations of it - disturbing works of intense realism, with an underlining vein of black humour. Dominique Nasta, the Belgian film theorist, spoke about the minimal use of music, whether diegetic or non-diegetic, in contrast to the wall-to-wall music of the majority of Hollywood films.

However, unlike other new waves, particularly the French nouvelle vague, which revelled in the present, all the best Romanian films are set in the recent past. But as Romanian film critic Eugenia Voda wrote in the early 1990s: "The Romanian cinema needs to start again from scratch. It has to regain a sense of everyday reality and it has to render truthfully an important slice of recent history which has been horribly falsified. A blast of neo-realism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_neorealism is practically a moral obligation for our cinema at this time in its history."

There was much speculation about what made the Romanian new wave special and there were worries that the bubble might burst. How did Romania, one of the poorest of the countries in the New Europe, manage to produce so many successful films? British critic Nick Roddick suggested that the Romanian film industry, such as it was, had no infrastructure and found it hard to produce films with larger budgets. The venerable David Robinson felt that the strength of the films was the way the directors made virtue out of necessity.

But all the directors I spoke to were determined to keep their independence even if it meant refusing money from a co-production which could mean profits leaving the country and some interference with the production. Of course, there was the danger that Romania might start producing the type of films that festivals expect of them, as Iran did previously. Anyway, in the short term at least, we can expect further jewels from Romania such as Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin', released in the UK on April 11.