Graduation | MakingWaves

Graduation

Original title: Bacaulaureat

Cristian Mungiu. 2016, Romania, 127 min

OPENING NIGHT
In person: actress Maria Drăguș

On the day before her first written graduation exam, a bright student falls victim to an assault that could jeopardize her entire future. Fearing the worst, her father jumps in, trying to avert a crisis, and triggers a chain of unfortunate events. Since 2007, when he was first invited to compete in the Cannes Film Festival with his second feature (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), director Cristian Mungiu has never gone home empty-handed. That year, 4 Months… scooped up the top prize—the Golden Palm—and in 2012 Beyond the Hills brought him the Best Screenplay award (plus an award for his two main actresses). This year, he was named Best Director for Graduation, a powerful, intricate, and universal study about the imprecision of parenthood, the relativity of truth, and the ambiguity of compromise. This is the morality play at its most startling, fresh from its two smashing screenings at the New York Film Festival, where it really got people talking. A Sundance Selects release.

Romania/France/Belgium, 2016, 127m
Screenplay: Cristian Mungiu
Cinematography: Tudor Vladimir Panduru
Cast: Adrian Titieni, Maria Drăguș, Lia Bugnar, Mălina Manovici, Vlad Ivanov
Production: Mobra Films, Why Not Productions
Producer: Cristian Mungiu
Co-production: Les films du fleuve, France 3 Cinéma
Romanian with English subtitles
DCP

Critics’ Corner

Cine-File: A new review of Nae Caranfil`s film (available online)

"DO NOT LEAN OUT THE WINDOW is a boisterous film that looks at the seismic shift in Romanian society with the cautious joy of a caged animal set free. It is a crucial precursor to the revelatory Romanian New Wave that should not be missed."

NY Times: Film Series to Catch in N.Y.C.

"In Romania, the democratic reforms that followed the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989 also turned the country into a global filmmaking powerhouse, culminating in what has been called the Romanian New Wave."

NYRB: J. Hoberman recommends

"These thirty films also include some of the best made anywhere during the past three decades."

MW public – Andrei Codrescu: “In Praise of New Romanian Film”

The New Wave festival returns to New York every year with astonishing new films, alongside a well-curated archive. I wouldn't miss it for the world.

J.B. Spins: “Luxury Hotel” – For fans of dystopian social satire

"Luxury Hotel could have probably only been produced during the immediate post-Ceausescu aftermath, when the palace was available, in all its faded grandeur. It is definitely spectacle, but serious, distinctively pointed spectacle."

Screenslate: “The Autobiography of N. Ceaușescu”- conceived as a flashback

"And now it is our turn, all these decades later, to be the ones to look and learn."

J.B. Spins: “The Oak” – Deeply compelling cinema

"The Oak is a defiantly bold, chaotically head-spinning indictment of Ceausescu Socialism, but it is also deeply compelling cinema. This is definitely auteurist cinema from Pintilie that still connects on a profoundly human level."

The Criterion Collection: Romanians… in America

"Film Forum will be showcasing thirty Romanian films made during the thirty years since the overthrow and execution of iron-fisted dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu."

„The Romanian New Wave shows no signs of waning, with steady input from such directors as Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristi Puiu, and Cristian Mungiu."

„The former communist country has emerged as a powerhouse of cinema over the last two decades and much has been made about the Romanian New Wave, a genre of naturalistic and unflinching films that have been consistently winning top prizes such as the Palme d’Or in Cannes and awards at the Berlin and Venice festivals.”

The New York Times

„In the last decade, the emergence of a Romanian new wave has been one of the most startling developments in world cinema, with one film after another winning prizes at Cannes and elsewhere.”

The Wall Street Journal

"Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema, the annual weeklong survey that has helped define and establish the southeastern European country as a stronghold of socially incisive, independently minded personal cinema.”

The Wall Street Journal

„Romania cinema has gradually become a central component of international film culture."