Romania’s Porumboiu and Mungiu Prepping for Cannes

Film journalists coined them as part of the “Romanian New Wave” and while I no longer abide by that term, another wave of Romanian films look poised for a showing on the Croisette this May. From Cineruopa.org we learn that both Corneliu Porumboiu (left) and Cristian Mungiu have completed their projects and will be ready in time for Cannes — the launching pad that made for huge impact in both of their careers as filmmakers. The superstitious Porumboiu didn’t tell us anything about this project in our interview with him for 12:08 East of Bucharest (read here) in late 2007, and Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) hadn’t yet confirmed the fellow filmmakers who would participate in his short film project (read our interview with him here) but the European film magazine confirmed that Porumboiu’s latest entitled Intermediate features some familiar Romanian actors (that is if you’ve seen the strong of recent films from this country) and the project that is written and produced by Mungiu includes a bunch of unheard of filmmakers in Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Hofer, Razvan Marculescu and Constantin Popescu who each directed one episode. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if the two films tussle for a slot positioning in the fest’s main comp, before both being taking part of the 8th Transylvania International Film Festival a couple of days later.