The New Year That Never Came

Romania, 20 December 1989. Something is happening in the country and nobody quite knows what. The narrative follows six people. A television director is preparing the new year programme and one name in it is causing trouble. A woman is being moved out of her home; the building is to be demolished. A soldier is to be sent to the border. An actor is planning to get out of the country. A boy has written a composition at school and his father freezes when he reads it. All of it on the same day, and none of them knows the others. Bogdan Mureșanu writes and directs; it is his first feature. Adrian Văncică, Nicoleta Hâncu, Emilia Dobrin and Iulian Postelnicu are in the cast. It is a Romanian production. The film won best film in the Horizons section at the Venice Film Festival. Its ground is the last days of the regime; the revolution begins the next day and none of the characters knows it. Its starting point is a short the director had made earlier; that story appears as one of the strands here. Its form is black comedy; the events proceed ridiculously and a lethal order stands behind them. The film uses television footage of the period and joins the fiction with archive. The narrative does not tie the six strands together and does so deliberately; they do not cross. Its limit is structure; there are many characters and some strands are weaker than others. Who it is for: viewers who like Romanian cinema and historical black comedy. Who it is not for: it is episodic, the references local, and the ending abrupt.