Astra Film

Alo!?

Director: Emilia Dobrot
Country: Romania
Year: 1999
Length: 54

An isolted village, not far from Bucharest. Most of its young people have left the village for the city. They could not communicate with the families they left behind, so they bought them mobile phones. How did the villagers adapt to this new type of communication?

Commemoration of Gabor

Director: Dan Curean
Country: Romania
Year: 1998
Length: 22

On the first day of November, people from Transylvania celebrate "The Day of the Dead". They bring flowers to the graves of their beloved ones and light candles. The film shows an unusual celebration, in a Gypsy family. The Gabors are not some ordinary Gypsies. They are wealthy people and the rest of the community looks up to them as aristocrats. They gather to commemorate old Gabor, the charismatic patriarch of the family. Following their tradition, they drink and sing by the grave, to the astonishment of the other people in the cemetery.

Coocko's Nest

Director: Cătălin Apostol
Country: Romania
Year: 1999
Length: 30

Local people call the mental institution in Calinesti, Prahova a realm of hell, populated by "nightmare creatures, wastes of society, useless beings with a hideous appearance". The 270 inmates live in a closed space and are quite ignorant of the outside world. The guide around this place is Florin Trimbitasu, a patient who knows that he will spend the rest of his life among his fellow-inmates behind the asylum walls.

Dog's Life

http://www.alexandrusolomon.ro/documentare.php?id=3&limba=RO  

Director: Alexandru Solomon
Country: Romania
Year: 1998
Length: 23

Even though Romania looks more like a yard without a watchdog these days, Bucharest is obviously a yard full of dogs. Humans and dogs share the same habitat and the two species are chained together intimately, like the damned souls in Dante's Inferno. Every day, the dogs' humane eyes meet the beastly eyes of the humans.

Golgota

Director: Ovidiu Georgescu
Country: Romania
Year: 1998
Length: 13

"Ideals are lyrical, destiny is tragic and life is comic". This is the motto for Alexandru Solomon Golgota, a peasant who has grasped to his dreams and ideals all his life.

Hausmeister

Director: Tudor Giurgiu(see interview )
Country: Romania
Year: 2000
Length: 23

A Transylvanian village with beautiful and sound houses, once a lively place, Gherdeal is almost deserted today. Its former inhabitants were ethnic Germans and today they are scattered throughout Germany. However once a year, for Whitsuntide, they come back and the village is resuscitated for a few days. Some people are busy fixing their houses, others make preparations and everybody is getting ready for the traditional feast. After Whitsuntide they leave and the village lies empty for another year. Few people have not moved out, mostly those who were too old to leave. One of them, Ioan Ongherth, is the Hausmeister, the man in charge with the church, the deserted houses and the memories of the community.

Holi

Country: Romania
Year: 1998
Length: 58

The portrait of the best manager of the Vienna Opera House, Ioan Holender, born in Romania, in Timisoara. In his youth, he did odd jobs before being admitted as a student at the university. They expelled him in 1957, out of political reasons. He emigrated to the West, to become one of the most important names in the opera production business. After forty years, coming home means meeting old friends and familiar places. His personal experience reveals the typical portrait of the Eastern European emigrant, with his nostalgia and illusions.

No Rush, No Women

Country: Romania
Year: 2000
Length: 35

During the last years of his regime, Ceausescu planned the construction of an artificial lake on the site of a residential area in the southern part of Bucharest. As a result, the whole neighbourhood was demolished, but the lake was never built. After 1989, a sheepfold appeared on the location of the abandoned building site. The film is a fragmentary chronicle of the shepherds' life, following the rhythm of their hybrid existence at the crossroad of rural pastoral tradition and metropolitan experience. The female component is both present and absent from their lives, absent from the daily routine but present in their thoughts, memories and fantasies. An anthropological document about shepherding in an Eastern European capital city at the end of the millennium and a visual and ethnographic comment on its social and political background.

Seven Stories From Beyond. Ghosts

Director: Florin Iepan
Country: Romania
Year: 1999
Length: 46

For those who know Transylvania and its history it is easy to understand why Bram Stoker chose it as a setting for his story of Dracula. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire sent special envoys to investigate the ever increasing number of cases when locals had dug out dead bodies from the graves and thrust stakes in their hearts. Eventually, some of the bodies were burned. The strange thing about them was that they were perfectly conserved, even if they had been buried for a long time. After hundreds of years, this practice is still alive. People do it to destroy the 'Strigoi', the vampires. The author documented many cases of such revenants haunting the living, killing their animals and sucking out their strength. People fight back with means they have inherited from a distant past, before the age of Christendom. This documentary is a search of answers to the eternal questions of life and death, reality and fantasy.

Theory of Numbers

Country: Romania
Year: 1999
Length: 26

A biased view of an extinguishing world, the Jew Community in Iasi. There were more than 100,000 Jews living in the city before World War II. Out of them, there are not more than a few dozens left today. The meeting of an engineer who emigrated to Israel ten years ago and a young doctor who is about to emigrate to the US shortly is only a pretext for a broader analysis of the condition, the hopes and the prospects of the Jewish Community in Iasi and of its members.

Country: Romania
Year: 1999
Length: 39

A fresh approach of the work and biography of Mihai Eminescu, the great Romanian poet. Over the years, all the political regimes in Romania used his image in propagandist purposes and constructed a legend around his name. At the 150th commemoration of his death the filmmakers attempt to evaluate the place of Eminescu in the consciousness of ordinary people, beyond the official myth.

The Village at the End of Rainbow

Director: Irina Luca
Country: Romania
Year: 1999
Length: 15

A piece of archaic life in a picturesque Maramures, village in Northern Romania, where people live in harmony with nature, obeying ancient rules. The film focuses on four people, who seem to come from the old times. An old man who built two wooden churches with his own hands, a woodcarver and an old couple make a chronicle of an extinguishing world.