Cast:

Maia Morgenstern, Razvan Vasilescu, Victor Rebengiuc, Dorel Visan, Mariana Mihut, Dan Condurache

Synopsis:

Bucharest, 1988. Nela, a young schoolteacher, is with her father, a former colonel with the ‘Securitate’ - as he dies. His will stipulates that his remains be used by medical science. No one wants his body as the refrigerators at the University aren't working.
Nela leaves for a teaching job in a provincial town. There she meets Mitica, doctor at the local hospital, who, like Nela, won’t accept to compromise and is full of dreams, optimism and natural rebelliousness.
They disturb everyone by their attitude but they survive the harshness of reality, as if touched by a kind of grace…
A story with grotesque overtones, where at each moment impotence seems to prevail in the face of an irremediably corrupt and violent society.

“Stubborn and without any subtlety I have held onto a royal image. An oak tree, which has roots, it’s a divine crown where time trembles, a link with the past, the future, a primitive symbol, hope. That’s it hope…” (Lucian Pintilie)

“The film, inspired by the carnivalesque and clownish, is a serious work of vast socio-political range. It condenses the cataclysms affecting the East after the fall of the USSR; within it can be found all of the symptoms tat led to the fall of the regime [...] the generalised disorder, the film’s modus operandi, allows access to all the possible stories and bestows a extraordinary freedom to the story.” (Vincent Ostria, ‘Reactions en chaine’, in Cahiers du cinema, no. 459, September 1992, pgs 36-37)

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