Astra Film

Cold Waves

http://www.alexandrusolomon.ro/

Director: Alexandru Solomon(see interview )
Country: Romania/ Germany/ Luxembourg
Year: 2007
Length: 84

Cold Waves tells the story of the strange alliance between a nationalist-communist dictatorship and international terrorism. It is a film about the war between Radio Free Europe and the Ceasescu regime who went as far as hiring Carlos de Jackal to annihilate key-people who worked for the Free Europe Radio Station. The film also makes an analysis of the power of media in the modern world.

Bar de zi and Other Stories

Director: Corina Radu
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 53

Regular people living in a regular neighbourhood. Through a series of portraits, the film traces the daily history of the Downhill City of Sibiu. Without spectacular plots and without romantic-like subjects, just samples of regular life. Thriving or failing people, who live with or without regrets... A puzzle that shapes up a specific world.

The Brassy Band

Director: Cornel Gheorghiţă
Country: Romania
Year: 2007
Length: 52

Poverty is the first thing to cross your mind when thinking of a Gipsy village. And it really is the first thing to strike you when entering a Gipsy village. However, despite the poverty and the hard life, Gipsies have the sense of music and rhythm like nobody else. Music is part of their daily life, and they need music just like they need air. The film explores the fascinating hidden world of the Gypsies.

For God 's Sake

Country: Romania
Year: 2007
Length: 48

"Crucified to death by a priest and some fellow nuns, a young nun died after being exposed to a ritual of exorcism performed in a remote Romanian monastery". This story was making headlines around the world in June 2005. The Middle Age scenario and spectacular media coverage stirred the imagination of the international general public. In February 2007, the priest was sentenced to 14 years inprisonment,  and the  nuns to 8 and 5 years respectively. What is real fact and what is fiction in this stunning story? Using archive photos, exclusive testimonies and original filmed material, the documentary goes beyond the media coverage in the case of the life and death of 23 year-old Irina Cornici. The story is complicated, as it involves malpractice, both medical and religious, and confused institutions in a new EU member country who is not yet ready abandon the communist legacy.

Behind History

Director: Iulian Capsali
Country: Romania
Year: 2007
Length: 105

The film witnesses the daily life and traditions of the Macedonian-Romanian community in Albania. It is a collection of stories about the Romanian school and church in Corcea, and that of the founder of these two institutions, Father Haralambie Balamace, or Papa Lambru, as people remember him, a prominent figure of the community, whose martyring death has inspired a popular song. His tragic destiny mirrors the fate of his people “whose only wish is not to disappear too soon” according to Pandi Bello, a distinguished  representative of the Macedonian-Romanian community and a recognized personality of Albanian culture. The documentary evokes Moscopole, the legendary city of the Macedonian-Romanians, and observes the life of the community who has managed to survive in a state that does not recognize them as an ethnic and cultural minority.

The Lamenters

Director: Andrada Domin
Country: Romania
Year: 2007
Length: 35

When the professional lamenters perform the archaic ritual of death, they become spiritually connected to those who pass to the Other World, establishing a link between life and death. In their everyday life they are common housewives, concerned with the daily household care. The film talks about the professional lamenters in the Romanian village Săpânţa, in Maramureş. They reveal their thoughts about life and death, and about the mysteries of Other World, hidden to most people, but open to intuitive perception of some. A film about the profession and the vocation of lamenting the dead.

The Potter From Binis

Director: Cosmin Ţiglar
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 27

A portrait film about a potter from Banat, Ionică Stepan, aged 80, who keeps alive the tradition of six generations of potters. His grandfather used to travel across the Austro-Hungarian Empire to sell his pottery or exchange it for grains. According to tradition, a man could not marry before mastering the art of pottery. The film observes what has remained of the potters’ tradition by introducing  a remarkable character to the viewer. 

Te aven baxtale!

Director: Gheorghe Şfaiţer
Country: Romania
Year: 2007
Length: 35

Stăneşti Community, bucketeer Rroma population in Hîrlău (a small town in Romanian Moldavia), tries hard to stay together and keep good old routines... though social cultural national forces lure them, irrepressibly, towards integration. Old Duşan and Istrate Stănescu remember the WWII apocalypse, when they survived the ordeal of the concentration camps. Nightmarish incredible stories haunt their minds. Romanian presidents Gh. Gheorghiu Dej and Nicolae Ceauşescu, chimeras of a confuse trade-off of good and evil, of humane and demon, of Gipsy gold hauled in and roaming destinies arrested. Mythical Gypsy King Dobrea is deputized and vivid scenes in the Stăneşti Clan’s life are firmly evoked in front of the Gypsy community. An arcane shadow weaves unrest and hope threads, in the chiaroscuro of a chamber...  the old fortune-teller, the paramount icon of the bucketeers of yore.The mirage of magic driving wheel spurs young Cezar to learn how to read, so he could  master the traffic code of rules…The confident world of the Stăneşti has music run through its veins, as it happens with all Gypsies... the reason why they sing and dance wishing us “Te aven baxtale!”- (Best of luck to you!)

To Be or Not To Be

Director: Anca Damian
Country: Romania
Year: 2007
Length: 87

A film about a theatre company in a prison. The prison is the high-security penitenciary in Arad, Romania. The actors? A long list of names, identities, sentences, and crimes. What happens to them, and what happens to us watching as they are punished for our own fears, addictions, and prejudice? After all, we cannot be sure about the point where freedom makes place to feelings of guilt, repentence or … theatre performance. Does this happen behind or outside the prison bars? People are likely to put up performances all the time, both on stage and in their real lives.

Vendetta

Director: Nicoară Mihali, Doru Filipaş
Country: Romania
Year: 2007
Length: 36

“As the cuckoo bird sang,
I was to die a young lad,
And instead of getting married
People came to see me buried.
My soldier service had been done
And I set off to my homeland.
A wretched man popped up,
He stabbed me with his knife,
And took away my life.”
In the early ’80, a young man was being stabbed right in front of a hotel in the central area of a city in Maramureş. He was coming home after having served in the army. The attack was a punishment for the sadistic treatment he had applied to his fellow-soldiers who came from the same region as he did. After 27 years of grief, his family cannot and would not forget this tragic event.

Viva Constanta!

Director: Emese Ambrus
Country: Romania
Year: 2007
Length: 48

Tudor Lakatos is a school teacher. He is in his 40s, he’s a Gypsy, and he wants to be famous. He also found a way to reach fame. He is an imitator of Elvis Presley. The lyrics of the great hits once played by the “king of rock-and-roll” have been translated into Romany, and Tudor Lakatos gets ready for the tour to Constanţa. His Romany-Rock  repertoire is the key to fame.

Electro

Director: Matei Alexandru Mocanu
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 52

The very first applied documentary that studies the Romanian Electro phenomenon thrills the audience with the author's excitement  on his profound documentation that captured on film numerous interviews with the main characters of the Romanian Electro stage (it also includes fans or foreign artists visiting), concert excerpts, live or recorded acts. The style is direct, modern and yet dapper, in perfect accord with the subject. Behind the wrapping, itself Electro -  unprecedented in Romania – hides a precise and ample X-Ray of the  indigenous Electro phenomenon. 

Independence

Director: Rastko Petrović
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 25

Independence is a former one-person apartments building in Sibiu, transformed into a block of flats. The very narrow apartments make life not very comfortable here. Răzvan is a child living in the Independence building, whose mother left to Western Europe for work. A sensitive portrait of a child who tries to live a normal life, but who sometimes is overwhelmed by the feeling of missing his mother.

Milky Way

Director: Ivana Mladenovic
Country: Romania
Year: 2006
Length: 10

Unlike other authentic mioritical shepherd films, walking their flocks through heavenly landscapes, the two main characters of this film are so called „Bucharest shepherds”. They take out at grass their cows in a saddening display, filled with plastic bags and all sort of garbage, near by the Capital City. Even so, Mihai and Titinel still do business with the same customers, the ones that remained retentionists and consistently refuse on buying the pasteurized milk found at the local shop. Nicely framed, very aesthetically clean, this film captures the destiny of the people of Romania, freshly joined to U.E..

The Miraculos Fountain of Doctor Benedek

Director: Zágoni Bálint
Country: Hungary/Romania
Year: 2007
Length: 28

This film portrays a real and tragic character that Romania knows very little about. Persecuted by the Communist regime for his belief, the early death of Dr.Benedek gave him the aura of a saint due to some paranormal manifestations that occured near his grave. The film does not try to convince us of the truthfulness of these phenomena, neither attempts it to prove that the water from the spring that flows near his tomb is miraculous. It  rather makes the portrait of a martyr putting together testimonies of those who knew him. Last but not least, the film explores the human need for faith and for models.

The Fallen Vampire

Director: Florin Iepan(see interview )
Country: Romania/ Germany
Year: 2007
Length: 52

The film follows the biography of the actor Bela Lugosi from his birth and early childhood in a small Transylvanian town, his early days as an actor when he played Jesus on the stage of the National Theatre in Budapest, and the years of glory after playing Dracula, the “mysterious count of the Carpathians”. He ended up being identified with his character, and never really escaped the Dracula label. Bela Lugosi is introduced in the film by people who knew him: close friends, family, oponents, directors and script writers he worked with (among them Bela Lugosi Jr., director István Szabó, actor Boris Karloff, historian Gary Rhodes). The documentary also investigates the influence of Bela Lugosi’s Transylvanian origin in the process of creating the character that made him famous.