Forest of the Hanged

1916. Apostol Bologa, an officer in the Habsburg army, is ethnically Romanian and his own people are on the other side of the line. He is caught between staying loyal to the empire and changing sides. Every moment he decides means somebody's death, and the man is slowly lost inside his own conscience. Liviu Ciulei adapted the film from Liviu Rebreanu's 1922 novel. The novel draws in part on the story of the writer's own brother, who was an officer in the same army. Ciulei took the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 for it, and the film became the first major Romanian picture to be recognised internationally. The telling shows the war not as a story of the front but as a ruin taking place inside a person.