A public protest has been started in recent days in Romania regarding the decisions of the grants board of the Romanian National Centre of Cinematography. The board has refused funding for productions by young directors, even in the case of exceptional track records. One of the protesters is director Cristi Puiu, winner at Cannes Festival in 2005 with ‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’ – a film released to great critical acclaim in Romania and abroad, and which is credited for helping to put Romanian cinema back on the map.

‘The Death of Mr Lazarescu’ was presented in Britain in the London Film Festival 2005, in the Romanian Film Festival, organised by the Romanian Cultural Centre in February 2006, and was released nationwide through Tartan Films in June 2006. The film gathered rave reviews in The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, as well as in other newspapers and magazines.

A protest petition is available on the Petition on-line web-site (Romanian text only), which can be viewed here: www.petitiononline.com/prcnc/.