Romanian film review – European Film Festival 2025, A Selection: Lovers, Pranksters, and Ghosts

It's almost impossible to think about anything not related to elections this weekend but if you should need some distraction, there are options.

Happening now is the European Film Festival, screening recent productions from the continent, very varied in theme, tone, and genre. The fest is playing Bucharest, Sfântu Gheorghe and Timișoara until Sunday and touring until the end of May to Botoșani (22-25 May), Deva and Iași (23-25 May), Chitila, Târgu Mureș and Târgu Jiu (30 May-1 June). I picked a few among the many great titles.

Fabian Stumm’s debut feature Knochen und Namen/ Bones and Names is a gently funny, very moving and personal look at relationships, romantic but not only. At its centre is a gay couple navigating many years together and the unavoidable stumbles and questions of middle age (desire, friendship, family, art, careers). Wise, sensitive and wonderfully light queer cinema with great tenderness for its characters, faults and all.

Mati Diop’s Dahomey is one of my last year’s favourites, focusing on the restitution of art to Benin by the French government, a most topical discussion in the art world today. The thousands of artefacts brought from the former West African colony (then named Dahomey) are returned only partially: namely 26, shamefully little. There is a long scene with students at the University of Abomey-Calavi discussing the return of the statues and its meaning to them, which is a thrillingly intelligent debate on colonialism, heritage, social aspects, politics, history, and identity. The political aspect is complemented by exquisite photography and shots of Benin. Diop’s film is a mix of documentary and fiction, interweaving razor-sharp commentary with dream-like imagery, to luminous effect. This is the director's second feature after the fictional debut Atlantics and I would venture to say the use of supernatural, dreamy elements, beautifully and organically entering the narrative, is already a trademark of her remarkable work.

The most certain to entertain and distract is surely the Ernst Lubitsch mini retrospective. Associated mostly with witty, sophisticated Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, Lubitsch was a Jewish Berlin-born filmmaker who left Germany in the 1920s and made a career in the US. The period fantasy and historical comedies Die Puppe/ The Doll and Die Austernprinzessin/ The Oyster Princess (both 1919 and shot in Germany) are funny, mischievous and ingenious examples of his genius. A treat. Best watched in a full cinema laughing out loud, they are classics for more than a century now so you can also catch them on YouTube.