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Inside the 2011 Cannes Film Festival Day 7: Catalin Mitulescu’s Loverboy

And the movement known as Romanian New Wave which begin with 2005’s The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu is slowly tapering out. With less films making direct correlations to the Nicolae Ceauşescu dictatorship era, we now have modern days reflections such as this one – an Eastern Bloc problem that in extreme cases has women being treated as cargo and being sex trafficked, but in this case represents a disenchanted wasteful youth were boyfriends second as pimps and where vulnerable younger women are almost aiding and abiding in their own misuse. While everyone’s fate is pretty much pre-determined, what we have here is a slight look inwards – slight changes in character that authenticates that the relationship might be more than what it was intended to be.

Loverboy premiered in the Un Certain Regard section – the same section where the filmmaker premiered his 2006 debut, The Way I Spent the End of the World. Among the several folks who came in support of the feature, we find a pair of young thesps who’ll have a lengthy acting career in George Pistereanu and Ada Condeescu.

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).

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