IFC Center, Roxy Cinema New York & DCTV's Firehouse Cinema
Traffic
Directed by Teodora Ana Mihai
Romania, Belgium, Netherlands, 2024, 119 min
In Romanian, Dutch, English, with English subtitles
OPENING
Wednesday, December 3, 6:30pm, IFC Center
Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) penned this loose adaptation of the notorious 2012 art robbery, where Romanian migrants stole paintings by Monet, Gauguin, and Picasso, among others, from a Dutch museum and later burned them to conceal their tracks. Much like Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Traffic strips the heist of all glamour; the crime is clumsy and anti-spectacular, serving as a strangely empathetic act of revenge for their misery as invisible, second-rate citizens. The ultimate irony of this social-realistic dramedy—the source of the film’s absurd humor—lies in the East-West cultural clash: the thieves, mistaking the Matisse for a “Matiz” car, realize the masterpieces are functionally worthless to them, a paradox guaranteeing their poverty persists. Featuring the magnetic Anamaria Vartolomei (seen this year in Mickey 17), Romania’s Oscar submission is a tragicomic yet pointed reflection on class, migration, and injustice.
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Nasty – More than just tennis
Directed by Tudor Giurgiu, Cristian Pascariu, Tudor D. Popescu
Romania, 2024, 104 min
In Romanian, English, French, with English subtitles
Sports journalist Steve Flink in attendance
Thursday, December 4, 6:30pm, IFC Center
Celebrated with a Special Screening at Cannes 2024, this adrenaline-charged portrait of legendary tennis player Ilie Năstase is as entertaining as a match with its protagonist. Using rare archive footage, the film pivots around his explosive 1972 season—Wimbledon runner-up, US Open champion, and a third Davis Cup final—a watershed moment that catapulted the Romanian from behind the Iron Curtain into the global spotlight. Simultaneously affable and generous, he could switch to haughty and obscene—a contradictory nature that earned him the infamous “Nasty” nickname. A stellar cast—including luminaries like Billie Jean King, John McEnroe, Boris Becker, Rafael Nadal, and Jimmy Connors—all acknowledge his defiant edge and controversial behavior, yet consistently vouch for his fundamental talent and kindness. This is a definitive smash into the essence of the sport’s initial rebellious idol, who shattered its staid gentility with brazen theatricality.
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Grey Bees
Directed by Dmytro Moiseiev
Ukraine, 2024, 102 min
In Ukrainian with English subtitles
Friday, December 5, 9:00pm, Roxy Cinema
Adapted from Andrey Kurkov’s novel, published in the US in 2002, the action unfolds weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, yet this is far from being a predictable, black-and-white depiction of an enduring conflict. Moiseiev’s film is a laconic and quietly daring affair, stripping existence to its basics in the Donbas’s desolate ‘grey zone’ and focusing on the last two human remnants—a solitary beekeeper and his cynical, former schoolmate—in a village cut off from the world. Their views, like their lives, face opposite directions: one East, one West. Their dynamic, though, is the film’s beating heart—a desperate, droll co-existence where past enmity is subsumed by common hardship, bound by sheer proximity and necessity. With every distant blast and shared gesture of humanity, this tender, understated drama is a testament to connection as the final act of resistance, while also exploring the painful realization that living in limbo is no longer tenable.
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Carbon
Directed by Ion Borș
Moldova, Romania, 2023, 97 min
In Romanian with English subtitles
Saturday, December 6, 2:30pm, Roxy Cinema
One of the rare features recently emerging from Romania’s neighboring country, Carbon is a black comedy and powerful political indictment born entirely out of a picaresque road trip. A young Moldovan man, lured by the cynical promise of a free flat, and his Afghan war veteran sidekick set off for the Transnistrian front in the 90s, only to stumble upon an anonymous, charred corpse. Their simple, noble quest—to identify the body and grant it a proper burial—collides with sheer bureaucratic failure: every authority figure they encounter—military commanders, the mayor, the local doctor and priest—proves more incompetent and ‘burnt-out’ than the deceased. Hauling their macabre cargo on a tractor-powered odyssey, the two protagonists become the improbable moral center of a morally bankrupt world. Ion Borș has crafted a bitter yet profoundly humane farce, a savagely ironic look at a society in freefall where rules evaporated faster than Soviet promises.
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My late summer
Directed by Danis Tanović
Croatia, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia, 2024, 98 min
In Croatian with English subtitles
Saturday, December 6, 5:00pm, Roxy Cinema
Better known for the Oscar-winning brilliance of his debut No Man’s Land, Bosnian director Danis Tanović delivers a refreshingly escapist counterpoint here. Swapping the gritty landscape of war that tinges his previous work for a luminous Adriatic refuge, this entertaining light-toned rom-com centers on a feisty woman (Anja Matković, also co-writer) arriving on Prvić, a tiny, car-less Croatian island of fewer than 500 people, to claim a familial inheritance. Forced to linger, she takes a barmaid job, navigating the eccentric local bunch and a quirky romance with a visiting novelist. The gorgeous setting functions as a palpable character, lending a sun-drenched nostalgia to this nuanced blend of breezy humor and deeper themes of generational debt. Subtle and sensual, and filled with highly effective running jokes (stoned cows are a highlight), Tanović’s film elegantly charts the heroine’s delayed coming-of-age while hinting at the fragile beauty of second chances.
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Bright Future
Directed by Andra MacMasters
Romania, South Korea, 2024, 89 min
In English with English subtitles
NY premiere
Producer Monica Lăzurean Gorgan and editor Andrei Gorgan in attendance.
Saturday, December 6, 9:30pm, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema
Andra MacMasters’ Bright Future is a critical piece of archival assemblage, drawing on raw VHS footage from the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students in North Korea, 1989. The irony is right there in the title, a term dripping with the terminal optimism of the Eastern Bloc just months before its collapse. MacMasters delivers her punch without external narration, letting the spectacular choreography speak for itself—a vast, monumental expression of ‘anti-imperialist solidarity’ that feels like an elaborate last gasp. The documentary is structurally sharp, juxtaposing the grand official statements with the granular, human-level idealism of the global youth attendees. It acts as an edgy exercise in geopolitical archaeology with startling contemporary relevance, compelling us to confront how political conviction, however utopian, struggles against the inevitable reality of historical change and mirroring our own moment of ideological fragmentation.
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Dismissed
Directed by Horia Cucută and George ve Gänæaard
Romania, 2024, 100 min
In Romanian with English subtitles
Sunday, December 7, 3:00pm, Roxy Cinema
Weaponizing the faux-documentary format with surgical precision, Dismissed is a low-key yet deeply unsettling conspiracy thriller built entirely on talking heads—a cold, calculated parade of faces offering carefully manicured lies. The micro budget constraints transform into style: the drama is in the writing and the constant drip-feed of revelations. A freelance journalist investigates a fatal server room fire at tech giant Futura AI after the case is quickly and suspiciously shut down. Dispensing with costly reconstructions, the film relies solely on the methodical accumulation of testimony to expose the rot. The relentless structure—the journalist’s skeptical face juxtaposed against utterly unreliable sources—slowly turns the dead victim from “exemplary employee” to an inconvenient religious outlier. A timely, chilling study in corporate erasure, this indie debut makes themes of workplace toxicity and AI ethics feel immediate, plausible, and terrifyingly real.
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The New Year that Never Came
Directed by Bogdan Mureșanu
Romania, 2024, 138 min
In Romanian with English subtitles
Actor Iulian Postelnicu in attendance
Sunday, December 7, 5:15pm, Roxy Cinema
Last year’s top awarded Romanian film proved equally successful with local audiences, clearly eager to revisit the country’s recent, most resounding event. Winner of the 2024 Venice International Film Festival Horizons Award for Best Film, The New Year That Never Came is a symphonic project, leveraging a solid six-strand choral structure to map the fall of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. Set on the incendiary day of December 20, 1989, the film’s power lies in a calibrated mix of absorbing drama and crushing, often dark humor. Mureșanu ambitiously intertwines disparate lives, following—among others—the escalating paranoia of a factory worker after his son’s forbidden wish; the moral agony of an actress forced to laud the regime on TV for the never-broadcast New Year’s special; and the dangerous cat-and-mouse game between a student trying to flee and the ubiquitous Secret Police. It is a tightly woven narrative tapestry, building to a cinematic rupture that mirrors the emotional catharsis felt when history shattered the Communist lie.
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Kix
Directed by Bálint Révész and Dávid Mikulán
Hungary, 2024, 94 min
In Hungarian with English subtitles
New York premiere
Sunday, December 7, 9:30pm, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema
Bálint Révész and Dávid Mikulán’s KIX is a twelve-year odyssey, a profound act of longitudinal observation tracking Sanyi, a restless street kid from the working-class peripheries of Budapest, from age eight into young adulthood. The title itself is loaded, referencing the street term “kicks” or the Hungarian profanity “fasz” (dicks)—Sanyi’s favorite graffiti tag. Often called the documentary answer to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood for its unwavering commitment to a single subject’s temporal development, KIX is raw, kinetic, and shot from the ground up—sometimes literally from a skateboard. The directors become embedded in Sanyi’s life, transforming observation into a decade-long friendship. It documents the evolution of youthful anarchy into a devastating confrontation with adult realities, showing how external social pressures irrevocably shape a life’s trajectory. It’s an honest, unflinching portrait of growth against the backdrop of an indifferent city.
