Romanian Film Festival Seattle – 11th Edition

A family of four, having been affected by a divorce, undertake their annual trip to the mountains, meant to get the children and their parents closer, as they live in different countries, France and Romania. Their holiday is turned upside down when the children vanish, running away on the pathway to a mountain hut, thus creating a tense atmosphere filled with frantic searches, confrontations between the adults and a climatic ending.

Poet, novelist and translator, 91-year-old Nora Iuga is a unique character on the Romanian contemporary literature scene. This is largely due to the author’s particular mix of playfulness and charisma, which is reflected in her writing at every level. With her books being banned for eight years under the communist regime, accused of a “morbid eroticism”, the documentary follows Nora Iuga for the duration of 3 years and tries to gently discover where her eroticism comes from and how it still influences her work. In a very intimate exploration of her mind and soul, we are invited to discover the secret of always staying young and to relentlessly searching for love, towards which Nora has a very special approach.

Clara is a divorced Romanian mother who babysits a little girl in a German town by the Danube River. Her son, feeling abandoned, runs away from home in an attempt to reach his mother by traveling on a small boat upriver.

In the waterlogged lands of the Danube Delta, in Romania, some horses were abandoned, when the collective farms collapsed at the same time as the Communist regime.  They survived and in time they went wild, forming a unique colony of wild horses that is increasing. Meanwhile the local people, who were similarly left to their own devices, are struggling to survive. The film explores  this extraordinary paradox: an increasing herd of horses and a decreasing number of villagers - and the threat to both groups, through the eyes of Ivan, a young village boy, who over the years has developed a unique and powerful bond with the horses.

Moldova, early 90s: Dima, a tractor driver, wants to be enrolled in the military troops to take part in the local war on the Transnistrian border. Vasea, an Afghanistan war veteran, joins him. While on their way to the front, they find a carbonized body. Authorities ignore them without helping to identify the body. Dima and Vasea decide to bury the corpse according to the proper Christian rituals, but shortly they will go, together with the body, on an absurd journey to discover his identity.