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With R.M.N., Bad Luck Banging (not to mention a new film from Radu Jude this year), Întregalde, and more in recent years, the Romanian New Wave is alive and well. One of the most acclaimed films coming out of the country as of late is Men of Deeds, the new drama from Two Lottery Tickets director Paul Negoescu.

Winner of 6 Gopo Awards aka the Romanian Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Editing, the drama will be released on August 4 at NYC’s Quad in NY and August 11 at LA’s Laemmle Royal from Dekanalog. Ahead of the release of the film, which has drawn comparisons to Coens and Twin Peaks, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the U.S. trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “A middle-aged police chief (Iulian Postelnicu) goes on with his job and modest life in a small town,...

When “Avatar 2: Way of the Water” surged to the top of the Romanian box office earlier this year to become the highest-grossing film of all time, it marked an auspicious sign for a theatrical business still looking to recover from the doldrums of the coronavirus pandemic.

Yet local industry-watchers were even more encouraged to see a historic first in 2022, with two Romanian films cracking the top 10 at the year-end box office — a striking achievement for an industry that hasn’t historically been known for cranking out crowd-pleasing hits.

Topping the list was “Teambuilding,” a satirical workplace comedy from directors Matei Dima, Alex Coteț and Cosmin Nedelcu, which briefly reigned as the top-grossing film ever in Romania before being knocked from its perch by James Cameron’s blockbuster, which has raked in more than $8.3 million to date.

Meanwhile, first-time filmmaker Cristian Ilișuan’s “Mirciulică,” a comedy about a 30-year-old forced...

Having failed to cut it in the city, mild-mannered Romanian cop Ilie takes a lower-pressure job as a police chief in a rural village near the Moldovan border. Expecting a quieter, easier life of mostly benign duties, he instead encounters even more violence and moral rot than he did before. That he’s surprised suggests Ilie (played by Iulian Postelnicu with a permanent woebegone grimace) hasn’t spent much time watching his own country’s cinema. An exceedingly mordant comedy that gradually bleeds out to tragedy, Paul Negoescu’s “Men of Deeds” is another Romanian exercise in finding personal and institutional corruption under every upturned stone, behind every unlocked small-town door, in every heavily conditional handshake. Audiences won’t be nearly as startled, but it’s bleakly compelling all the same.

Back in 2016, Negoescu scored a major homegrown hit in Romania with his jaunty, shambolic crowdpleaser “Two Lottery Tickets,” a...

Paul Negoescu’s fourth feature, “Men of Deeds,” which world premieres in competition Sunday at the Sarajevo Film Festival, is at first glance a departure from the Romanian director’s previous work. Set in the rural region of Bucovina, it’s a world removed from the swanky bars and bistros of his last film, the Bucharest-set “The Story of a Summer Lover.”

The film follows llie (Iulian Postelnicu), a small-town police chief who hopes to settle into a modest, comfortable life. A man of low expectations and dubious morals, he sets his sights on a small plot of land that’s up for sale — an orchard in the countryside where he imagines he can make a fresh start.

Nothing, however, goes according to plan. Before long Ilie is being thwarted by bad choices and haunted by past misdeeds, leading to an inevitable reckoning after a series of violent events compels...

When the first edition of what would become the Sarajevo Film Festival was held in 1995, the Bosnian capital was in the final year of a devastating, four-year siege. Electricity shortages plunged the city into darkness, while food and hard currency were scarce. The inaugural screenings were held in the basement of a bombed-out building – a literal hole-in-the-wall – where tickets could be purchased with cigarettes instead of cash.

The annual event that emerged from the rubble didn’t just contribute to the cultural life of the city. In the early days after the siege, organizers and local clean-up crews got to work around Sarajevo, refurbishing historic buildings that had been destroyed by the shelling and converting them into festival venues. “Everyone who was involved felt that they were contributing to this rebuilding,” says festival director Jovan Marjanović. “The city was almost fully destroyed. And the festival was the place, and this time in the summer,...

The white-hot moment of the Romanian new-wave film renaissance is long in the past. “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” came out in 2005, “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” in 2007. Other landmarks of Romanian cinema also now go back quite a ways, like “Police, Adjective” (2009), “If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle” (2010), and “Graduation” (2016). That’s not to say there haven’t been good Romanian films of late — earlier this year, I championed Two Lottery Tickets, a kind of droll Romanian Jim Jarmusch film. The bitter truth, though, is that over the last decade the profile of international impact and acclaim that Romanian cinema once held has radically diminished.

It might jump-start again with the appearance of “Miracle,” one of the best films I’ve seen at the Venice Film Festival. It’s the third feature written and directed by Bogdan George Apetri, and it shares many of the classic qualities of Romanian cinema.

“Romanians are bad at making movies. We have such a beautiful country, but they only show doom and gloom,” whines Pompiliu (Alexandru Papadopol) in the shaggy, summery comedy “Two Lottery Tickets.” Meant as a playful jab toward the Romanian New Wave movement that has put the country on the cinematic map, local audiences might have found a little bit of truth in writer/director Paul Negoescu’s script as they were clearly ready for something different.

Continue reading ‘Two Lottery Tickets’: The Romanian New Wave Gets A Summery, Slacker Comedy [Review] at The Playlist.

Exclusive: Gotham-based distributor Dekanalog has secured rights to a trio of titles off the festival circuit and is lining up theatrical releases for this year.

The pics are: Abdelhamid Bouchnak’s Dachra; Paul Negoescu’s Two Lottery Tickets, and Mariam Ghani’s What We Left Unfinished.

Dachra won the coveted ‘scariest film’ award at Overlook Film Festival. It is based on a true story and follows a group of students who become trapped in an isolated village while trying to solve a 25-year-old murder case.

Two Lottery Tickets sees a trio of miscreants embark on a madcap quest to retrieve a winning lottery ticket after losing it in a mugging. The film screened at Zurich and was a box office hit in its native Romania.

What We Left Unfinished is a documentary telling the real-life tale of five unfinished films from the Afghan Communist period, spanning 1978 through 1991, and a tight-knit...