Graduation

Director Cristian Mungiu's 2007 Palme d'Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was one of the key films of the Romanian New Wave. Like its peers, it dealt with life - and, in this case, illegal abortion - under the country's Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, but with his fourth feature Mungiu tells a story with more global implications. The well-meaning protagonist is Dr Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni), whose daughter Eliza (Maria Dragus) is assaulted on the way to school. Eliza's exams are on the horizon, and if she gets good grades, she'll have a place at a top UK university. But Romeo, who remembers the old days all too clearly, won't leave anything to chance, calling in favours to ensure that Eliza, badly shaken by her ordeal, gets the results she needs. Using the brutalist urban setting of a Transylvanian suburb, Mungiu paints an unflattering portrait of a society gone to seed, but the film's moral is universal: no matter how high-minded or well intended, corruption is always corruption.