Three Kilometres to the End of the World

Adi is seventeen and is spending the summer in his village in the Danube delta with his family. One night he is beaten by two men in the street. The next morning what the village talks about is not the attack but why Adi was beaten. His family starts looking at him differently. His father calls in a priest to put his son right, and the village's leading men step in to have the matter closed. Emanuel Pârvu's film screened in the main competition at Cannes in 2024 and won the Queer Palm; Romania also sent it forward as its Oscar submission. The story makes a monster of nobody and that is what is genuinely uncomfortable about it: the father loves his son, the priest believes he is doing good, and while everyone acts according to their own idea of right the boy is left in the middle. A hundred and five minutes. The camera is calm, the voices are low, and the film never raises itself.