Metronom

Alexandru Belc's 2022 Romanian film is set in Bucharest in 1972. Ana, seventeen, is at a house party with her friends when they decide to send a letter to Metronom, the music programme Radio Free Europe broadcasts clandestinely into Romania. Then the Securitate, Ceaușescu's secret police, arrive at the door. The film's strength is showing repression not through a torture scene but through an ordinary conversation in an interrogation room: the officer does not shout or threaten, he simply waits, and the young people inform on each other. Belc uses long takes and natural light; the party runs almost in real time, and that is how the gap between a moment of freedom and the collapse that follows is built. It won best director in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Who it's for: viewers interested in the Romanian New Wave and stories of surveillance under communism. Who it's not for: anyone wanting fast narrative, or who will find the hopelessness of betrayal and submission heavy.