Annual Top Films Lists

Top 150 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2020: #27. Malmkrog – Cristi Puiu

Published on January 3, 2020

Malmkrog

2019 has come and gone, but we’ve yet to see the latest project from Cristi Puiu, which was reportedly completed sometime ago (with a lengthy running time upwards of three hours). Malmkrog, which according to the film’s producer Anca Puiu, is filmed mostly in French (with some German, Hungarian, and Russian thrown into the mix). Puiu’s latest is inspired by and freely adapted from philosopher Vladimir Solovyov’s book War, Progress and the End of History: Three Conversations, Including a Short Story of the Anti-Christ. This is the same work which informed his 2013 project Three Exercises of Interpretation, which was a filmed workshop where Puiu did exactly as the title indicates. Puiu is commonly referred to as the Godfather of the Romanian New Wave (which has now unleashed a new generation of filmmakers who have divorced themselves from the earlier aesthetics of Puiu, Mungiu, and Poromboiu), and his 2005 sophomore film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a cornerstone of the Wave, which won top honors out of Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Puiu’s 2001 debut Stuff and Dough premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight, while he returned to Un Certain Regard in 2010 with Aurora and competed in the Cannes main competition in 2016 with Sieranevada (read review). The cast of Puiu’s latest includes Frédéric Schulz Richard, Agathe Bosch, Diana Sakalauskaite, Ugo Broussot, Marina Palii, Istvan Teglas, Sorin Dobrin, Judith State, Edith Alibec, Simona Ghița, Zoe Puiu, Levente Nemes, Bogdan Geambașu. Of note, we believe Malmkrog is a different project than Manor House (Hora Staccato), which has yet to go into production.

Gist: Malmkrog is a French language period piece set in 1900 focusing on concepts of economic materialism, Tolstoian abstract moralism, and Nietzschean hubris.

Release Date/Prediction: To be released in France in March, we predict Malmkrog will compete at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival, which would be Puiu’s first bid for the Golden Bear.

Nicholas Bell

Los Angeles based Nicholas Bell is IONCINEMA.com's Chief Film Critic and covers film festivals such as Sundance, Berlin, Cannes and TIFF. He is part of the critic groups on Rotten Tomatoes, The Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA), the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and GALECA. His top 3 for 2021: France (Bruno Dumont), Passing (Rebecca Hall) and Nightmare Alley (Guillermo Del Toro). He was a jury member at the 2019 Cleveland International Film Festival.