Astra Film

A Few Things About Queen Marie

Director: Sorin Ilieşiu
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 23

"I was barely seventeen when I came to you. I was young and ignorant, but very proud of my native country, and even now, I am proud to have been born an Englishwoman... but I bless you, dear Romania, country of my joy and my grief, the beautiful country which has lived in my heart". Queen Marie of Romania
The film is conceived as a personal account. Fragments of the Queen's biography are interpreted by the acclaimed actress Maia Morgenstern, whose profile is projected on a background of archive footage and photographs.

Faces

Director: Adrian Voicu
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 52

If you have been born and you live in the Danube Delta, and you own a fisherman's boat, you don't have to worry too much about today and about tomorrow. At least, that's what locals used to think. Owning a boat means that you can fish and feed your family, and it also means communication. Surrounded by waters, the only way people can get from one place to another is by boat. The film tells the story of the transition period in the Danube Delta, an isolated area at the Eastern Romanian border, governed by other rules than the rest of the country. According to the locals, they are the first Romanians to see the sun rise and the last to see justice done. In the recent years, some nouveaux riches have seized the opportunities offered by the Danube Delta and started fishing or tourism businesses there, most of the times at the disadvantage of the locals. The film explores the ways they find to cope with this new situation.

Gold Seekers

Director: Cristian Niţulescu
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 25

Gold has always fascinated people's minds. The film explores the essential role it has played in the history of a community living in a gold mining area in Transylvania.
While explaining the technical differences between gold mining and gold washing, the interviews reveal old stories of legendary mine shafts where you can still find massive gold veins, and of miners who dug out dozens of kilograms of pure gold in only one night. The characters also talk about how the lucky miners used to spend their fortunes, and about the early years of communism, when the regime imposed state control on all gold mining activities. „Gold has brought us good luck, but it has also been a curse” – says one of the characters. Today, traditional mining and gold washing techniques face extinction, but the fascination for gold remains untouched.

Jiu River Valley People

Director: Gheorghe Şfaiţer
Country: Romania
Year: 2005
Length: 60

Jiu River valley is the most important mining area in Romania. Over the years, it has been the scene for many conflicts. In 1977, the miners from Jiu River valley had the courage to oppose the Ceausescu regime. Later, in the early 90’s they were used by the politicians in power in their attempt to reduce to silence the democratic opposition in the country. Their violent interventions in Bucharest have entered recent history under the name of mineriads. After these turbulent episodes, the Jiu River valley miners find it difficult to escape the label of violent people. Using the observational style, the film tells their real life story.

Red Poppies

Director: Eniko Magyari- Vincze
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 55

The film was made in the framework of an anthropological research conducted within a (Boyash) Roma community from the city of Orăştie, Hunedoara County. It addresses issues related to women’s status, marriage, birth, abortion, contraceptives, domestic violence and prostitution through women’s narratives. The viewer can understand these phenomena through the experience of the Romany women within their own community, and from the moments when they have to face off instances of institutional racism. The viewer will also observe the gap (and the lack of communication) between their perspectives and the point of views of those whom they confront with in the different situations of everyday life. The film identifies the strategies these women use against discrimination and how they construct their own world as a reaction to social exclusion and marginalization.

Rodica Is a Good Boy

Director: Marian Ilea, Gheorghe Dinu
Country: Romania
Year: 2005
Length: 53

Since his early childhood, Vasile Ghiman from a mountain village in Maramures considered himself to be rather a girl than a boy. He called himself “Rodica” and wore women’s clothes. Vasile/Rodica grew up with this transsexual dilemma. At 30, he is still confused about his place in the community, although the people in the village have accepted him as he is, proving that rural communities in Romania may be more open-minded than most people might think. The film captures Rodica’s confessions on camera, sharing with the viewer his anxieties and his attempts to come to terms with himself.

Slack Time

Director: Miruna Tîrcă
Country: Romania
Year: 2005
Length: 20

 2 Mai is a village on the Black Sea coast, close to the Romanian-Bulgarian border. In the last fifteen years, more and more tourists have come here for their summer holidays.The small fishermen's village has turned into a seaside resort. However, few of the tourists who come here for the beach and to have a good time, realize that the village has a life of its own, which goes on after they leave. The film focuses on the life of the village community during slack season.

Village Of Socks

Director: Ileana Stănculescu
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 78

In the small village Viscri/ Deutschweisskirch, in the middle of Transylvania, all women are knitting socks. A German musician sells the socks to Germany, to Austria and to other countries. And he also enjoys living in Viscri. He teaches to Viscri-children German, he plays piano and sings about the beauty of the Romanian language and last but not least, he organizes the sock-export. The majority of the Saxons who lived in Viscri before has left the village. Only a few are left. There are no jobs in Viscri, but many tourists are coming, because of the impressive old church and also because of the socks. This documentary is a portrait of a very special village, isolated in a beautiful landscape but still full of life.

Who Wants To Publish My Diary?

Director: Dite Dinesz
Country: Romania
Year: 2005
Length: 17

She was abandoned in an orphanage shortly after having been born; she was sexually abused, diagnosed with a mental handicap, and lived in a violent environment; she was subjected to physical and emotional pain. The film makes the portrait of this woman quoting from her own diary. Now, at 38, she can say that she has made it. She is a university graduate and has found a job as a teacher. But all the pain she has suffered has remained in her memory and on the pages of seventeen notebooks.

Rumenye, Rumenye

Director: Radu Gabrea(see interview )
Country: Romania
Year:
Length: 50

Kletzmer music originates in Central and Eastern Europe and has become a symbol of Jewish culture. Kletzmer used to be a functional music, always played at weddings and other Jewish ceremonies. Today, this music links European and Jewish culture and stands for the post-Holocaust revival of the latter. Kleztmer music is like a bridge connecting the sufferings of the past with the hope for conciliation and understanding in the future. American ethnologist Yale Storm is world famous for his research of Kletzmer music. He gives an account on the revival of Kletzmer from a double perspective: as a historian and as a musician. No other country had a stronger impact on Kletzmer music than Romania. “Doina – Jewish Blues” celebrates the connection between Jewish and Romanian music. The film features Elisabeth Schwartz, the famous Yiddish singer whose ascendants were born in Romania.

Writing On The Wall

Director: Ilinca Călugăreanu
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 53

Graffiti can be seen as an artistic form of resistance to authority and at the same time a mean of expression and connectness to its own subculture.

This documentary is based on a research project on the emergence of the garffiti phenomenon in the city of Cluj-Napoca. The structure of the film follow the stages of the research, starting with the exterior signs, interviewing graffiti writers and revealing their position toward and connections with the international graffiti community. In its second part, the film analyses the internal structure of the Cluj community of graffiti writers, and the place and meanings of graffiti productions in the public space of the city of Cluj.

The Apocalypse by Cioran

Director: Sorin Ilieşiu, Gabriel Liiceanu
Country: Romania
Year: 1995
Length: 58

"Universal history is nothing more than the recurrence of catastrophes in the expectation of one final catastrophe." (E.M.Cioran)

The film brings the viewer to Cioran’s home in Paris, walks along with him to his favourite places, and records his recollections of a “lost Paradise”, his place of birth in a village near Sibiu, where he never returned. We meet Cioran the philosopher and Cioran the man, profound and explosively humorous, shortly before his departure from this world. The film is narrated by the outstanding Romanian philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu.

Babu – Cazul Gheorghe Ursu

Director: Cornel Mihalache
Country: Romania
Year: 1996
Length: 47

In 1985, Dipl. Engineer Gheorghe Ursu, nicknamed Babu, was arrested by the communist authorities because they had found out about his diary, where Babu put down everything he saw and heard about what was happening in the country in those days. In November 1985, Ursu was beaten to death in his prison cell by his room-mates. One of the aggressors was an informer working for the Militia and the Secret Service, the Securitate. The film combines the interview where the latter gives his version of the story with Babu’s voice from an old recording made by one of his friends in Paris in 1978, and with the accounts of another of Babu’s friends, a Romanian SF writer living in Paris since 1967. Babu’s friends accuse the authorities for delaying this murder case. The story is told by the murderer, the victim and the victim’s friend. Only the murderer has survived.

The Bridge

Director: Ileana Stănculescu
Country: Romania
Year: 2004
Length: 75

One of the bridges across the river Tisa has a long and complicated story: the bridge between Sighet and Slatina. Sighet is a small town in the north of Romania, close to the Romanian-Ukrainian border, and Slatina the neighbouring town on the Ukrainian bank of the Tisa.
This bridge has been build during the Austrian-Hungarian empire and destroyed  shortly before the end of the Second World War. A whole web of family, cultural and economic ties was destroyed after this war. The northern bank of the river became part of the Soviet Union while the southern bank continued to be Romanian. The river Tisa separated the two towns for more than fifty years.

Children of the Decree

(see film in full lenght )

Director: Florin Iepan(see interview )
Country: Romania
Year: 2004
Length: 68

In October 1966 Nicolae Ceauşescu siged Decree no. 770,  which made abortions illegal in Romania. The punishment was imprisonment.
The only exceptions were women over 40 and those who had at least 4 children in care.
For the Dictator, the decree was the birth certificate of the New Man, obtained through racial and ethnical purification. In reality, Ceauşescu symbolically signed his own death sentence: “after a quarter of a century, he was going to be killed by the very children born at his own command”.
Born on command is above all a testimony aimed to prevent people from forgetting and repeating the mistakes of the past.

Clara B.

Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 52

Through archive images, news and authentic pictures from the beginning of the 20th century, the film tells the fictional story of Clara B., photographer and reporter, an independent and strong woman – born in Strasbourg in 1901 and who lived her life between France and Germany. 
Another fictional character, Jonas, museum curator, recomposes her existence. He discovers Clara B. through the documents donated to the museum where he works.
A meditation on the memory of archives and the history of the 20th century.

Construct

Director: Sorin Ilieşiu, Marina Celac
Country: Romania
Year: 1996
Length: 13

“Construct” is a visual essay on the dynamics of the architectural structure designed in 1934 in Bucharest by Marcel Iancu, a member of the Dada movement.

The Craziness of the Heads

Director: Thomas Ciulei
Country: Romania
Year: 1997
Length: 86

Lena Constante, an innocent victim of the struggle over power within the Romanian Communist Party, was arrested in January 1948 and involved in the trial of Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu. After long years of detention (she was released only in 1961), sole survivor of the trial, she writes a shocking book, "Silent Escape", which is the basis of this film and which constitutes an amazing testimony about the will to survive, in prison, escaping through creation.

Escaping From The Body – Sever Frentiu

Director: Laurenţiu Damian
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 25

Through his personality and his work, painter Sever Frenţiu counts among the most complex artistic figures of the late 20th century. The film is a documentary resource put together only few years after the artists decease, highlighting the meanings of his work.

Goldafaden's Legacy

Director: Radu Gabrea(see interview )
Country: Romania
Year: 2004
Length: 58

In 1908, a Jewish funeral procession of over 70,000 people blocked the traffic in Manhattan. The next day, newspapers revealed to whom all those people wanted to pay their last tribute. His name was Avram Goldfaden, poet and playwright, called “Shakespeare of the Jews”. 126 years ago, Goldfaden founded in Romania the first professional theatre, in the city Iasi, in Northern Moldavia. In 1876, Mihai Eminescu, the poet, wrote a review about the new theatre and noted that “the director has a pleasant voice and a handsome appearance”. The film follows Goldfaden’s journey from Iaşi, Romania to New York and rediscovers an outstanding figure of Jewish culture.

Gossip At The Shot Pillars

Director: Cornel Mihalache
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 27

January 2006, Cluj Napoca. In the center of the city, on the sidewalk near the monument dedicated to the Heroes of the Revolution, killed in December 1989, two people are chatting. A television reporter approaches them and inquires about the meaning of the monument, which the people call „the shot pillars”. The conversation gradually turns to politics, because we are in Romania and because it is cold outside. The two characters turn out to be...

Gratian

Director: Thomas Ciulei
Country: Romania
Year:1995
Length: 45

In Izbuc, a village in the Romanian Carpathian mountains, people believe, that Gratian Florea is a warewolf. According to an old custom, when a child is born, the midwifes call upon the spirits, to make the child hard working, beautiful, loveable or wise. It is said that when Gratian was born, the umbilical cord broke only, after the midwife called for him to be a werewolf. This stroke of fate was to determine his life.
Driven out by his family, the 73 year old Gratian now lives outside the village in a shack with no water and heating. His preoccupation with astronomical numbers, he says, with thoughts about belief and moral values, transient and eternal life, will lead him towards the discovery of infinity. Through his trip into the universe, he will surpasses his worldly existence, while his soul will become, in its essence, equal to God.
Every Saturday Gratian goes into the village and begs for the food he needs during the following week. The saying goes, that those people who refused to give him something, had their sheep eaten by wolves after a few days.

 

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

Director: Alexandru Solomon
Country: Romania
Year: 2004
Length:74

In 1959 there was robbery at the Romanian National Bank in Bucharest. The robbers were six formerly high-ranked members of the communist party. They were arrested and then forced to play themselves in a propaganda film meant to reconstruct the crime and the investigations that followed it. At the end of the trial (also filmed), the defendants were sentenced to death and executed. Three weeks later, the film "Reconstruction" was released. The author of this documentary carefully researched this incredible story and found terrible testimonies related to the events that happened more than forty years ago.

Ioan Nicodim – A Passenger on Earth

Director: Anca Damian
Country: Romania
Year: 1998
Length: 20

A film about the artist Ion Nicodim, about the place of his birth and inspiration -Dobrogea, about the creation process, about our origins.

Land of Silence

Director: Robert Lakatos
Country: Romania/ Hungary
Year: 2002
Length: 37

What can a photo camera mean for a 10-year old boy who lives in a soundless world? The film follows the summer holiday adventures of Alfred who can neither hear nor speak. Because of his handicap, he attends a special school in Cluj. Back home for his holidays, he meets a photographer from a neighbouring village. The man, who has the same handicap as Alfred, offers the boy a photo camera. And Alfred’s adventure begins.

The Land Is Waiting

http://www.thelandiswaiting.ro

Director: Laurenţiu Calciu
Country: Romania
Year: 2004
Length: 59

The film explores the life of an extremely poor family, living in a village in northeast Romania. The parents have made incredible efforts to send all ten of their children to school. Five of them have even made it to the university in the city. The film focuses on Mihai, one of their sons. After less than one year of study, Mihai had to give up Theological School. He chose to return to the village and help his family work the tiny plot of land they own. We follow him as he copes with the hardships of everyday rural life. Because he plans to return to the university next year, he uses every spare moment to study for his exams. He talks about his short experience in the city, and about the marginalization of the students of rural origin. Daily routine is interrupted by the occasional conflicts with his overworked mother. However, there are also the little joys of the household, such as when a calf is born or the goslings hatch. The filmmaker maintains an objective yet intimate approach, of the destiny of a young man who is caught between two worlds.

On the Road

Director: Dumitru Budrala
Country: Romania
Year: 1997
Length: 43

Every autumn, shepherds from Transylvania set off with their flocks in search of green grass. They follow an ancient route which takes them hundreds of miles away from home. During his journey, the master of a flock is murdered in a forest. His youngest son must take over one thousand sheep, five donkeys, seven dogs and four hired shepherds. Sleeping in the open, marching through villages and fields, fighting bad weather and truck drivers’ prejudice, he learns to be a  master.

Self Portrait on An Autumn Leaf

Director: Laurenţiu Damian
Country: Romania
Year: 1999
Length: 21

"To paint means to let yourself carried away by an inner drive". This has been painter's Ion Tuculescu artistic faith. The film explores the secret world of the artist, a world full of secrets. His utmost desire has been to be ' a primitive', to let himself guided only by his instincts. The film is a story going beyond the artist's easel.

Timisoara. December 1989

Director: Ovidiu Bose Paştina
Country: Romania
Year: 1991
Length: 78

Set in the title Romanian city during the tumultuous fall of Communist dictator Ceauşescu, this documentary chronicles the attempts of government soldiers to quell a citizens revolt. But during the few days of the uprising a surprising thing happened--the soldiers joined the citizens. The filmmakers use interviews, video footage of the events and archival photographs to recreate the rebellion, but due to a lack of explanation within the film, the chronicle will be most useful to historians and those well-informed in recent Eastern European history.