Acclaimed filmmaker Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days) returns with this searing human saga about a father driven to extremes in order to protect his daughter’s future.  

Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) is a seemingly honest doctor who regrets having settled in his native Romania, a country still teeming with corruption and back dealings. He channels his ambitions for a better life into his teenage daughter, Eliza (Maria Dragus), who’s just one exam away from securing a scholarship to a prestigious British university. But when Eliza is attacked on the eve of her test, endangering her ability to pass, Romeo takes matters into his own hands to ensure her success.  

Cristian Mungiu has said the following: “I knew I wanted to do something not so much about corruption, but about the way in which corruption influences you on a very personal level. I knew I wanted to do something about education. I started asking myself if there is not a connection between these two things in society. [In Romania,] we have a habit of educating children the same way we were educated. This, if it doesn’t encourage, then at least won’t stop corruption.”  

Milos and I saw this film at a screening and were fascinated by the way that Mingiu challenges people to look at things that they do not want to recognize or acknowledge about themselves. The film makes you fully aware that “there is no editing in reality,” which is a key example of FACETS following cultural movements that express the diversity of the world around us and New Romanian Cinema adopted an austere, minimalist approach, focusing on the forces which shaped their society after the fall of Communism. We have always been on the pulse of these cultural dynamics, a choice which was confirmed when Graduation was the winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes. Graduation is a masterful look at the complex moral choices and compromises some people make when desperation takes hold.  

Film selection and text written by Charles Coleman, FACETS Film Program Director.