Yahoo Lifestyle Corneliu Porumboiu to Be Special Guest at Visions du Réel: His Films ‘Cast an Offbeat, Critical Eye on the Changes to Romanian Society’
Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu will be the special guest at the 56th edition of documentary festival Visions du Réel, which runs April 4 – 13 in Nyon, Switzerland. There will be a retrospective of all Porumboiu’s feature films, and he will deliver a masterclass.
“Imbued with dark humor, Corneliu Porumboiu’s films play with the absurdity integral to Romanian society, which threw off the yoke of communism with the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu and the revolution of 1989, instantly supplanting it with unbridled capitalism,” the festival said in a statement.
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Porumboiu has released 13 films (including six shorts), during a career that spans almost 20 years. He made a name for himself on the international scene with his first feature length film, “12:08 East of Bucharest,” winner of the prestigious Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2006. His feature films, which include “Police, Adjective” (2009) and “The Treasure” (2015), were also praised by critics and earned awards at Cannes, consolidating his position as one of the greats of new Romanian cinema – alongside Cristi Puiu, Lucian Pintilie, Radu Jude, Andrei Ujica and Cristian Mungiu.
“Inspired by a realistic, political approach, Porumboiu’s cinema scrutinizes Romania’s recent social history, mischievously taking on its sometimes tragicomic dimension. Through dialogues infused with deadpan humor, and a discreet yet rigorous aesthetic which uses carefully composed frames and long takes, he crafts a meticulous observation of characters perplexed as they struggle to both understand a deliberately opaque reality and try to gain some sort of fulfilment from it,” the festival said.
His most recent feature film, paranoid thriller “The Whistlers” (2019) – which was screened as part of Cannes’ Un Certain Regard competition – “confirmed the filmmaker’s love for the absurd – an aspect he sees as an integral part of his country.”
Porumboiu is also interested in the world of football, a personal subject since his father was a professional referee at international level. In “The Second Game” (2014), father and son commentate, within a minimalist setting, on a match from 1988 refereed by his father, in a snowstorm, under the eye of the Romanian propaganda TV cameras. His other documentary, “Infinite Football” (2018), is a deep dive into his home city of Vaslui, in the company of a childhood friend, now a bureaucrat in local government and obsessed with one idea: improving the rules of football or replacing it with a new, more equitable sport.
“Driven by a unique and extremely referential humor, Corneliu Porumboiu’s films, which are often akin to fables, cast an offbeat, critical eye on the changes to Romanian society, yet they do so gently and with great affection. He is a great filmmaker that we have dreamed of welcoming for a long time; it will be fascinating to approach his work through the prism of its perspective of reality,” stated Emilie Bujès, artistic director of Visions du Réel.
The full program for the 56th edition of Visions du Réel will be released on March 12.
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