Cold Waves

Infidelity drama, male egos, lost dogs in Startsladden favorite Stefan Constantinescu’s arthouse gem about a man consumed by jealousy who risks losing everything while searching for the truth.

In 1959, in Romania, six former members of the nomenklatura and the secret police organize a hold up of the National Bank. After their arrest, the state forces them to play themselves in a film which reconstitutes the crime and the investigation. At the end of their trial, filmed live, they are sentenced to death and executed. A month later, the film Reconstitution was released and became a sensation throughout the country.

A young TV reporter would like to shoot a program about a former political prisoner nicknamed The Pharaoh, who spent forty years in Siberian exile. She manages to locate a former lover, his sister, and his onetime cellmate, but questions still remain...

This is a film about what the car traffic turns us into. For 5 months the director in the passenger seat accompanies five ordinary people (A half paralyzed man who not only drives a car, but he also helps other people to avail themselves of cars; Peruvian woman, who was been raised in a city with an equally crazed traffic; a father who has recently lost his daughter in a traffic accident; a policeman who was beaten up by the militia before December 1989) on their every day journeys around the capital.

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.

Ducu is a a 45-year-old Romanian writer facing a midlife crisis. He leaves Bucharest to be part of a creative residence in Berlin and in an attempt to rebuild his life. He swings between two countries and two women: Andra, his hot-tempered wife, who wants a divorce, and Giulia, Ducu's love from his youth, who lives in an eco-village in Germany - Lebensdorf. Looking for an answer, he goes through a series of strange, funny and even eye-opening events.

Arsenie Boca, a priest, theologian, and mystic persecuted by the communist regime, is considered holy by many believers, although he has yet to be canonized.

A research center in Sukhumi, the capital of today’s Abkhazia. Legend has it that it was built at the end of the 1920s to create a hybrid between man and monkey. The hypothetical creature never saw the light of day, but people and primates, like sad relics of the past, live together in the derelict wings of the medical institute to this very day. [KVIFF]

An extravagant odyssey from Communism to Capitalism as seen from the perspective of one of Romania's most charismatic symbols, the Dacia automobile.

An imaginary return of dictator Ceausescu after 20 years of capitalism in his country, Romania, where he finds a new society but also old habits in the country's businessmen.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, Robert travels, together with his daughter, from Tulcea to Bucharest. Robert has to take some black spawn to Mrs. Zina, a wealthy woman who lives in a select neighborhood in the capital. For his daughter, this is the first visit to the capital.

A notorious convict who'd been an undercover agent during the communist regime agrees to return to prison to kill an inconvenient witness against some influential figures. But an unexpected bond forms between the two, and he ends up questioning his mission.

A first hand account of one of the biggest cases of human trafficking during the Cold War. A story of greed, courage, hope and remorse.

An unconventional chronicle of the literary and artistic Romanian avant-garde. The film recreates the atmosphere of those frenzied years (1916-1947) in the spirit of the avant-garde, through a bewildering collage of fundamental texts and images.

A docu-comedy about politics in a world where citizens are dogs, politicians are dog breeders, national institutions are local dog breeders’ associations while the highest international forum is the FCI (Fédération Cynologique Internationale, the World Canine Organisation).

After the revolution of December 1989, Romania is in full transition. Incertainty and chaos have followed Ceausescu's downfall. Fane, a worker in a wharf on the river Danube, is a former dissident who was in involved in politically motivated uprisings. Now that he has achieved what he has fought for, he is unemployed and everything around him seems to fall to pieces. His whole family falls victim to the changes of the early 90s. His daughter prostitutes herself, his elder son ends up in prison and his younger son becomes a thief.