Romanian Film Festival Seattle – 12th Edition

This gripping hybrid documentary, the latest film by renowned director Tudor Giurgiu, recreates the struggles faced by a Romanian community in Bassarabia while under Soviet occupation during World War II. A dramatic separation of a young couple becomes the least of their problems when the wife and two little girls are deported to Siberia, and the young husband escapes to Romania crushed by the guilt of losing the loved ones. Yet, the unfathomable happens and the two meet later in life. It is through the mastery of the actors who perform the theatrical reenactment that the story is revived and becomes a comment on our own times.

In order to fulfill their dreams, four teenagers decide to make money by selling the SAT prompts online.Sofi wants to raise money to pay for her college in Switzerland, Alex dreams to build his own recording studio, Amalia seek to impress her senator father, and Tomiță looks for an adventure.Everything is going well until they are all forced to face the reality around them and the consequences of their actions.

By famous documentarist Andrei Ujică, TWST takes as its starting point the arrival of the Beatles in New York for their August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, and as its title a Beatles song that already anticipates a time when the present moment will have become a haunting past, neither retrievable nor forgettable. But the frame of reference steadily broadens. Adjacent realities of 1965 are juxtaposed—the New York World’s Fair, the Watts riots filtering through from the East Coast on television. It becomes a cinematic poem of that generation embedded in its own history.

Trying to get money to cover a debt for her son, who is in danger of going to prison, Alina, a nurse, faces an unexpected ethical problem. In a city of social disparities, the rich have neither time nor empathy for the poor, while the poor cannot afford resisting financial temptations. Will Alina give in and abandon her faith and morality?