One out of the bloc

Romania is no longer typecast for vampire movies, says Stephanie Bunbury. NOBODY saw Romania coming, but you couldn't miss it once it was there. Within just a couple of years, a series of extraordinary films was emerging like a magician's string of coloured handkerchiefs from a corner of the former Eastern bloc hardly anybody at the big film festivals had thought about for years. As A. O. Scott put it in The New York Times, it felt as if everyone at the Cannes Film Festival of 2005 was asking the same odd question: "Have you seen the Romanian movie?" They have been asking it every year since. In the turning-point year of 2005, the big - and, ostensibly, really unlikely - hit from Romania was Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu. Puiu's film, about the last night in the life of a sozzled, unpleasant elderly man with a sore... [read full story]