The first feature film produced in Romania, and arguably the first international movie clocking in over two hours (even though only 83 minutes remain today) was September 1912's "The Independence of Romania."
The production was an adventure in movie-making in the extreme. An actor Aristide Demetriade, took the director's reign while the young Grigore Brezeanu was really the brains behind the operation, who became instrumental in getting financing from a private investor. Meanwhile, the production team received as much resources from the Romanian government and military as they needed. It helped that the ruler of the Romania, King Carlos I, who had fought in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, received star billing as himself, even though it was 30 years after the war.
"The Independence of Romania" is really a collection of vignettes strung chronologically, from civilians dancing in the street to soldiers battling oi the fields. It has essentially no plot, but the event of Romania and the Balkan countries overthrowing 500 years of Ottoman and Turkish rule was such a big deal that the meandering film didn't bother the Romanian audience viewing the sprawling epic for the first time. As one observer noted, the movie appears to be a documentary filmed during that war, with wide shots dominating the action. Of course, there wasn't any filmmaking back then.
The production of "The Independence of Romania" was so fraught with difficulties the stories emerging from the efforts of those filmmakers became legendary. The 2007 film, "The Rest Is Silence," Romania's entry into the 2009 Oscars, dramatizes the making of the 1912 film and its trials and tribulations, all done in a humorous vein.
