2016 Cannes Critics’ Panel Day 2: Puiu Thinks of You, The Living with “Sieranevada”

Fans of Romanian cinema are well compensated this year with not one, but two comp offerings from the Eastern european nation: Cristian Mungiu is measuring up Graduation (Bacalaureat) against Sieranevada, Puiu’s latest starring one of our faves in Mimi Brănescu. Puiu has been delivering cinematic gems since 2005 – the year that Puiu saw his sophomore film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu claimed the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section. Previously he hit the Directors’ Fortnight with Stuff & Dough in 2001, and has since returned with the brilliantly dire and suffocating Aurora (2010) and more recently, a special screening for Bridges of Sarajevo.

Sieranevada was the first comp title out of the gates with the early screening on Wednesday, and several critics gave the longest film of the comp a near perfect score of 4 stars. Categorized by Variety’s Peter Debruge as a film that is “rewarding audiences with the patience to unravel this tangled ball of yarn”. Our Nicholas Bell perhaps described it best: the “head spinning first hour, which forces the audience to slowly acclimate to a troubled milieu in a packed apartment somewhere in Bucharest with family members attending a ceremony for their recently deceased patriarch, the end result is an increasingly captivating series of exchanges, eventually boiling over into underlying issues allowed to consume them while they let their carefully prepared dinner grow cold.”

Produced by wife Anca Puiu and a team comprised of Mirsad Purivatra, Sabina Brankovic, Lucian Pintilie, Labina Mitevska, Zdenka Gold and Olivier Thery Lapiney, this takes place three days after the terrorist attack on the offices of Parisian weekly Charlie Hebdo and forty days after the death of his father, Lary, a doctor in his forties is about to spend the Saturday at a family gathering to commemorate the deceased.

Check back with us twice daily for the latest grades (three times on Tuesday) and make sure to click on the grid below for a larger version.