Bogdan Mustata’s ‘Wolf’ Enters Cannes’ L’Atelier

Bogdan Mustata is in preparation mode for Wolf and a major push forward might come from the Croisette this may – he was selected to attend L’Atelier program of Cinefondation – now in it’s 6th edition from the folks at Cannes. Each year, L’Atelier selects about 15 feature length projects from around the world and invites their directors to the Festival de Cannes in order to put them in contact with film professionals.

Mustață’s Lupu (Wolf) tells the story of a 16-year-old guy whose father died when he was a child. The film deals with the overwhelming responsibilities that the young-man Lupu has to bear: protecting his little brother, Darius and his mother which has a new lover. He’s also in love with a girl named Clara. Lupu is not a teenager who talks much. He’s an uncommunicatively person who tries ceaselessly to hide his emotions. One day, his brother, Darius, accidentally kills an old woman so he does what he thinks at that moment that is the only thing right to do and takes the blame on him while hiding the body in the basement. From that point the entire world changes for Lupu, the reality and fantasy becomes one and the same thing.

The Romanian filmmaker has lived for four years in Vietnam and one year in Dubai where he wrote and directed for television. In Romania, besides other short films he contributed to, Mustață has been assistant director for Cătălin Mitulescu’s The Way I Spent the End of the World. In 2008 he grabbed the media attention with his short film A Good Day for A Swim (O zi bună de plajă) which won the Golden Bear at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. The film screened at dozens of festivals and won multiple awards at the 2008 Palm Springs International Short Film Festival.

During the past two and a half years Mustață wrote the screenplay and tried to find the budget needed for what is his first feature. The Romanian National Center of Cinematography gave almost 270.000 euro for this project. Wolf has also been part of Torino Film Lab Development Program 2009-2010 and is one of the winners of Torino Production Award while the Romanian director received, at the beginning of this year, the Sundance Institute Mahindra Global Filmmaking Award 2011, as part of Sundance Screenwriters Lab 2010, and the Cinelink Eurimages Award in Sarajevo 2010.

Waiting for his first feature film to be made, Bogdan Mustață wrote Loverboy, a film directed by Cătălin Mitulescu that will be released most probably during this autumn.
Wolf is produced by Strada Film and the shooting will start this summer.