The Small (but not small) Romanian New Wave

In programme

The Small (but not small) Romanian New Wave

In 1996, when the dean of the Theatre and Film Academy in Bucharest opened the CineMAiubit International Student Film Festival in Bucharest, this school was the most prolific producer of films in Romania. The “official” film industry was only producing one or two (at most three) features a year (and with quality steadily dropping). Meanwhile, unique short films – representing about 6 feature films in total length – were enchanting audiences with their imaginative freshness. The short student films of the second half of the 1990s ushered in what would later be hailed as the Romanian New Wave: Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu and Radu Muntean were among the students of the academy at that time.

The idea of the B16 to organize a retrospective of Romanian shorts was very inspiring for us. During the selection process, we did not limit our focus to films which had international film festival success around the cusp of the millennium. We also looked for the ability of Romanian filmmakers to create a “big” world in a “small” film, proving that artistic quality does not depend on the length of a film. The Romanian shorts represent a kind of small new wave, which we dare to call “small” only because they are not features – that is why Small has to be with a capital S.

Dan Mircea Duţă
Director of the Romanian Institute of Culture