Romanian Films in Cannes

Two Romanian films have their premieres at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, running between May 14 and 25

Corina Sabău, 18.05.2019, 13:12

Two Romanian films have their premieres at the 72nd edition of the Cannes Film Festival, running between May 14 and 25. La Gomera, directed by Corneliu Porumboiu, was included in the official competition, while the short film The Last Trip to the Seaside, directed by Adi Voicu, was screened in the Semaine de la Critique section.

La Gomera, Corneliu Porumboiu’s fifth feature length fiction movie, was filmed on location in Romania, Spain, and Singapore in 2018, featuring a Romanian and Spanish cast. Cristi is a corrupt Romanian cop involved in a 30 million Euro deal with organized crime, who goes to the La Gomera island, in order to learn El Silbo, the local whistling language. This coded kind of communication is supposed to help him free Zsolt, a drug dealer in detention in Bucharest, and the only member of the drug ring who knows where the money is hidden. Corneliu Porumboiu told us how he came about the story:

Corneliu Porumboiu: I was in France, and I saw a documentary about the island and this language. This was ten years ago, as I was finishing Police, Adjective, and the documentary stuck in my head. I started reading up on the whistling language, and I envisaged the film as being a crime thriller. I wrote several versions, and four years ago I took it up again, and eventually realized that I will take it into the film noir genre. Making this movie took a lot of research. I used the Internet at first, then I went to the island to see what I was dealing with. Because there are things that you can’t just read about, you have to be there. I went to La Gomera three or four times, one week at a time. In addition, because the language is protected, and is taught in schools as a compulsory subject, I worked with a teacher, the head of the El Silbo language department, who came to Romania to coach the actors. This was my opportunity to work with an expert.

Corneliu Porumboiu sees La Gomera as a natural extension of his preoccupations:

Corneliu Porumboiu: “Theme wise, the movie is linked to two of my previous movies, Was It or Was It Not, and Police, Adjective, which were also centered on language. In Was It or Was It Not, an entire community was trying to define a concept, that of revolution, in order to understand what they had lived through, while Police, Adjective is a movie about bureaucratic and political language, so this movie came as a natural extension. I think all my movies deal with communication, it is one of my recurring themes.

The short film The Last Trip to the Seaside, directed by Adi Voicu, screened in the Semaine de la Critique section, a section focusing on uncovering emerging talent in cinema, is the director’s second fiction short. The first was The Fog, which won awards in Angers and Sankt Petersburg. The plot unfurls in the compartment of a train going to the seaside. The six passengers converse, but one moment of suspicion derails the entire interaction. Before trying his hand at fiction, Adi Voicu directed, by himself or in collaboration, several documentaries, dealing with a variety of subjects, including the Danube Delta and Romanians in Ukraine. He said he would not limit himself to this type of movies, and that it doesn’t matter what form you give a story:

Adi Voicu: “Fiction movies are cinema too, and if some stories go well as documentaries, others go better as fiction. I think this is the reason for which fiction appeared, out of the need to tell some stories when you cannot resort to documentaries. For example, you cannot film inside a police van as it goes to the police precinct, it’s against the law. Therefore, you have to resort to fiction to show a scene like that.

One of the actors featured in the short film The Last Trip to the Seaside, Ana Ciontea, spoke to us ahead of the premiere in Cannes:

Ana Ciontea: “I am very happy that the movie was selected for the Cannes festival, and I congratulate Adi Voicu, I believed in his films right from the start. It was a great experience to act in The Last Trip to the Seaside, the script won me over right away, even though Adi made some changes along the way. What also won me over was Adi’s attention to detail. During rehearsal I became convinced that I was going to be in a very good movie. Also, very importantly, Adi Voicu boosted our confidence. This moved me, and helped me very much.

(translated by: Calin Cotoiu)