Clara Vodă

On July 19–21, 2001, over 200,000 people took to the streets of Genoa to protest against the ongoing G8 summit. Anti-globalization activists clashed with the police, with 23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani shot dead after confronting a police vehicle. In the aftermath, the police organized a night raid on the Diaz high school, where around a hundred people between unarmed protesters—mostly students—and independent reporters who documented the police brutality during the protests had took shelter. What happened next was called by Amnesty International "the most serious breach of civil liberties in a democratic Western country since World War II."

After suffering terrible headaches and stomach cramps, Mr. Lăzărescu, a lonely 63 year-old man, calls for an ambulance, beginning one man’s hellish journey through Bucharest hospitals in search of proper medical care. As the night unfolds, his health starts to deteriorate fast.

Ricardo, an amusing grumpy middle-aged man, decides to travel overland to India, as he used to do, shipping hippies in the sixties. Only now he has other things on his mind. He has been in a wheelchair for 10 years, suffering from a degenerative disease, that's pushing into its final stages. This is to be his last journey. Accompanied by his housekeeper Dana he sets off, crossing Europe, through Turkey, Iran, Pakistan. It turns out to be a funny and inspiring journey, opening doors both Ricardo and Dana thought were closed forever. As the landscape widens ahead, all of the crucial things of life unfold before them. Most importantly, Ricardo finds a reason to live.

Wonderfully surreal, painfully real, this is the story of children, adults and animals who live together trying to have a better life, but sometimes death comes unexpectedly. The lives of three characters surrounded by a bunch of extraordinary, funny, absurd but quite realistic events. It is all about us, people who eat the animals that they love and the animals that love people unconditionally.

On set, a young couple of actors rehearse a love scene without success.

A teenager prisoner awaits his release when two weeks before that happens he's told that his mother is returned home. Meanwhile, he finds himself in love with a Sociology student, Ana, working in the penitentiary as an intern.

There's no place like home. As long as you know where your heart is.

One worker in a bankrupt factory finds an unusual solution to save his co-workers from unemployment. If it doesn't work the factory will be privatized and sold to a French company planning to convert the plant into a snail cannery. Only 300 of the 3000 workers will keep their jobs.

A taciturn Romanian divorcee acquires a hunting rifle and initiates a killing spree.

Mircea has a 15-year-old daughter whose boyfriend is invited to dine with the family. He arrives early and they go to her bedroom. While watching TV, Mircea can hear his daughter moaning from her room. The dinner starts and Mircea finds out that the boyfriend supports a different football team.

Two teenaged kids discover a miniature bottled city buried beneath a construction site. They must protect the tiny civilization within from reptilian alien hunters after its everlasting power supply.

'Pop-Up' is a triptych drama about three strangers affected by one random event. It was filmed in Newcastle, Australia, and Transylvania, Romania.

Parents squabbling over a sick bird that was brought in by their son Alex.

Dragos Binder is doing research in order to write a fiction film based on the true event of his parents fleeing the country in the 80s communist Romania, but then he changes the subject, moving the camera lens on himself.

Alex, in his mid-thirties, is a quite neurotic character. When his mother is hospitalized with a stroke, the caring son's life gets out of track. At the hospital he finds himself in a burlesque kind of human zoo full of unexpected characters and surprising events. Trying to manage the situation in between everybody's advice, he's coming hypochondriac. While his mother seems to feel perfectly fine Alex is making his own set of mistakes - throughout with best intentions.

Luca (20) seduces girls then leaves them in the hands of his friends at the Black Sea port of Constanta. Luca falls in love with Veli, one of his potential victims. It's summer down the Danube river, in Harsova. The music is loud, the cars are fancy, the girls are tanned and Veli runs away from home in Luca's bed. First love has never felt more dangerous.

This Romanian dramatic comedy offers metaphorical commentary on life after Ceausescu's reign as it tells the story of a rural community turned topsy-turvy in their mad quest for the snails a prominent senator has requested for his dinner. The trouble begins when a rather imposing, pompous senator comes to visit a small rural Romanian town for a ribbon-cutting ceremony for their new hydro-electric dam. After he finishes his speech, the senator is accosted by a Swiss film crew eager to interview him. The senator is inordinately concerned with presenting a positive image of Romania to the world at large and so when he learns that he and the journalists are to stay at the same villa, does everything he came to make sure that they see nothing scandalous.

While fully enjoying the life of the 70's, in communist Romania, a young man is arrested and accused of a terrible crime. Freed a few years later and deeply affected by his sinister experience, he tries to find out what had really happened.

Exploring one of the defining features of modern society, therapy, as seen through the eyes of a psychiatrist whose professional and personal life is on the verge of collapse.