Mandragora

On July 19–21, 2001, over 200,000 people took to the streets of Genoa to protest against the ongoing G8 summit. Anti-globalization activists clashed with the police, with 23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani shot dead after confronting a police vehicle. In the aftermath, the police organized a night raid on the Diaz high school, where around a hundred people between unarmed protesters—mostly students—and independent reporters who documented the police brutality during the protests had took shelter. What happened next was called by Amnesty International "the most serious breach of civil liberties in a democratic Western country since World War II."

After suffering terrible headaches and stomach cramps, Mr. Lăzărescu, a lonely 63 year-old man, calls for an ambulance, beginning one man’s hellish journey through Bucharest hospitals in search of proper medical care. As the night unfolds, his health starts to deteriorate fast.

Back from a professional trip to Paris, a neurologist at the pinnacle of his career has to pick up his wife so that they can attend a family meal to commemorate his father, who died a year before. At his mother's flat, the guests are waiting for the priest to arrive while arguing about all kinds of things connected and unconnected with the world’s events and wars.

Different portraits, four short stories, four moments in time capturing the wanderings of a few souls, stuck at the crossroads of History.

NELU, a man in his forties, works as a security guard in the local supermarket in Salonta, a small town on the Romanian-Hungarian border. This is the place where many illegal emigrants try to cross, by any means posible, to Hungary and then further to Western Europe. One morning, NELU will “fish” something different out of the river: a Turkish man trying to cross the border. Not able to communicate verballly, the two men will somehow understand each other. NELU takes the stranger to the farmhouse, gives him some dry clothes, food and shelter. He doesn’t really know how to help this stranger. The Turkish man gives NELU all the money he has on him so he will help him cross the border. Eventually, NELU takes the money and promises he will help him cross the border tomorrow, MORGEN…

A taciturn Romanian divorcee acquires a hunting rifle and initiates a killing spree.

Among the guests who come to the mansion of aristocratic landowner Nikolai over Christmas are a politician, a young countess, and a general with his wife. They dine and discuss topics such as progress and morality. As the debate becomes more heated, cultural differences become increasingly apparent.

Women and men in the middle of the night, without their own clothes, without personal papers and money, without their car keys and mobile phones. In a deserted city the only solution would be, regardless of how far home is, to walk alone all the way there.

Seeking shelter in her work from the pain of a breakup, Lena, a painter turning 40, is commissioned to decorate a brutalist luxury hotel nestled in the depths of the Romanian forest. There, where the Danube ends its course in seemingly miraculous springs, Lena’s moral views are confronted with an overwhelmingly corrupted community.

A young man from Constanța who has his own business aims to expand, but he doesn't have the resources.

The story of Victor, a 45-year-old rocker, whose love for his son Florin go beyond what is socially and morally acceptable. The father's everyday life is orbiting around his son, a drug addict.

Romania's winning streak at festivals continues, but the most unusual and ambiguous one still lurks in mysterious darkness. The undeservedly underrated Gabriel de Achim challenged the widely renowned Cristi Puiu (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”) to make a film using all the things, which the established Romanian master most detests in cinema. He constructed a non-linear story with wickedly tangled flash backs and flash forwards and set the same actors to perform different and multi-faceted roles.

While people in Western Europe were used to choose between hundreds of brands, the communist Romanian used to have a different experience: all our life we lived with only one brand for each basic product. Imagine the importance that this 'mono-brands' could acquire for the lives of those who made them and for the lives of those who consumed them. A love story between man and object.

Three films based on Three Conversations by Russian writer and philosopher Vladimir Solovyov.The actors' 'exercises' develop into a minimalistic trilogy on cinema and literature, social and spiritual life, acting in film and in real life.

Viorel, a quiet, upright tractor driver from a small town in west Romania meets Mocanu, a high profile politician campaigning for a seat in the European Parliament. Mocanu’s car has broken down nearby and Viorel and his wife welcome the politician into their humble home. Under investigation for corruption, Mocanu sees an opportunity and decides to stay with this modest family during the rest of the campaign, winning people’s hearts by posing as a common man next to his “old friend”, the honest, hard-working farmer. In return, Viorel will get a new tractor.

Dreaming of the West, Boryana is determined not to have a child in communist Bulgaria. Nonetheless, her daughter Viktoria enters the world in 1979, curiously missing a belly button, and is declared the country’s Baby of the Decade. Pampered by her mother state until the age of nine, Viktoria’s decade of notoriety comes crashing down with the rest of European communism. But can political collapse and the hardship of new times finally bring Viktoria and her reluctant mother closer together

Cristiana is a 30 year old woman, brought up in a "proper", bourgeois middle-class family. Her time is split between writing for her PhD in Earthquake Engineering, conversations with Alex and Michelle, her two close friends and occasional, eagerly awaited rendezvous' with Dan, a married man with whom she is romantically involved. After her parents move out of the family apartment into a new house, she decides to get a dog. It is something that she wanted ever since she was a child and now that she lives on her own she can finally fulfill this wish.

A trio of quirky lifelong friends create a makeshift family, but their tight bond is tested when one of them falls in love with a writer.

It's Maxim's birthday. He's 8 years old. He lives together only with his mother in a village not so close to the big city. For his birthday, his mother will take him to Bucharest, to McDonald's. There, Maxim hopes to meet his father.