Romanian film review: BIEFF and The Stranger

Vanishing futures: this was the motto of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF) and its fantastic selection proposed new ways to imagine a future that seems now more blurred than ever. The festival wrapped on 30 September and it visited cinema Studio in Timișoara this past weekend. I could not have picked one screening to recommend over another (yes, that good!), but in the interest of keeping this column compact, I will pick a few titles that stayed with me.

The winner of the national short film competition, Andreea Chiper’s Three Bedtime Stories/ Trei povești de noapte bună listens to three women talk about their lives and deceased husbands; playful, moving, perceptive. It was also the most wholesome common experience; there was so much laughter in the audience. The short is also available for free in Cinepub as well, and you can watch it here (in Romanian only):

Alma Buhagiar’s In My Dreams, or in Ours (winner of Best Visual Concept) is a rapturous tale of eroticism and looking. Another beauty is Cosmin Nicolae’s Cherry Master, a story of loneliness in an eerie Bucharest by night. This was a great edition for visually striking colours and textures: I also loved Patri Preda and Alina Brăcaci’s Uprooting/ Dezrădăcinare, in which a daughter reflects on her her relationship with her mother.

And then there is the avantgarde classics programme, amazing on a big screen, from the famous, multi-quoted Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943) and La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962, still one of the most ingenious, mind-boggling films ever made) to Artavazd Peleshian’s lyrical essay on the life of Armenian shepherds The Seasons (1975), or Peter Tscherkassky’ brain and eyeball-melting horror metafiction Outer Space (1999).

Fresh in cinemas across the country and also in Timișoara (to stay here a bit longer) is François Ozon’s The Stranger/ L’ Étranger. Based on Albert Camus’s eponymous novel, its protagonist is Meursault, a taciturn, apathetic young clerk working in French-colonised Algiers who kills an Arab man and endures the following events with barely any reaction. Meursault is such an impenetrable, passive character (played by Benjamin Voisin’s with precise, aloof elegance) that the second part of the film can be maddeningly frustrating until it all explodes in a perfectly staged release, a confrontation between Mersault and a chaplain who visits him in prison (perennial scene-stealer Swann Arlaud). The first part of the film, by contrast, is hypnotic and sensual. Meursault may be an enigma, but a seductive one, and Ozon tackles questions of morality, love, colonialism with (maybe too much) restraint but with his usual refinement. Easily the most beautiful film I’ve seen this year.