News

The juries for the feature film, short film, documentary film and Efa categories of the 19th Sarajevo Film Festival have been revealed.

As previously announced, Bosnian director Danis Tanovic will be president of the feature film jury. He will be joined by:

Uliks Fehmiu, actor (Serbia)Christine A. Maier, director of photography (Germany)Charles Tesson, artistic director, Cannes’ Critic’s Week (France)Mirela Oprisor, actress (Romania)

The competition programme jury in the short film category is:

Paz Lázaro, programme manager, Berlinale Panorama (Spain, Germany)Mladen Miljanović, artist (B&H)Paul Negoescu, director (Romania)

Selecting the best documentary film in the competition programme will be:

Joslyn Barnes, writer/producer (Us)Jasmin Basic, film historian/curator (Switzerland)Vibeke Bryld, director/writer (Denmark)

The jury that will select the Sarajevo short film nominee for the European Film Awards 2013 includes:

Hagar Ben-Asher, director/screenwriter/actress (Israel)Miguel Dias, director/selector of Curtas Vila do Conde Iff (Portugal)Leona Paraminski, actress (Croatia...

★★★★☆ Romanian director Radu Muntean's intensely observed domestic drama Tuesday, After Christmas (2010) is about the end of a marriage and the start of an affair. Paul (Mimi Branescu), a well-off, middle-class Romanian living in Bucharest has to make a choice between the two women he loves. Happily married to Adriana (Mirela Oprisor), Paul has also fallen for a younger woman Raluca (Maria Popistasu), his daughter's orthodontist.

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Tuesday, After Christmas

Directed by Radu Muntean

Romania, 2010

Patient, affecting, and rewarding, Tuesday, After Christmas, is easily identifiable as an entrant into the Romanian New Wave.

Paul (Mimi Branescu) is in love with two women, his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor), also the mother of his daughter, and Raluca (Maria Popistasu), their younger, more attractive dentist. With Christmas rapidly approaching, Paul’s infidelity becomes more difficult to bear, to the extent that he must decide between the two.

This is kind of like Scenes from a Marriage were it to be crosscut with an unmade sequel Scenes from an Affair. Shot like most of the major films coming out of current Romania, Tuesday, After Christmas is high-key, with real-time scenes, and ordinary locations. Dealing with social situations but in a less gruesome, urgent manner than its peer 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, Muntean’s film cuts infrequently. There is no coverage within a scene to speak of,...

Each week within this column we strive to pair the latest in theatrical releases to worthwhile titles currently available on Netflix Instant Watch. But this week, we’re taking a break from our regular format to wrap up our Year-End 2011 coverage by offering the very Best of 2011′s Now Streaming releases, as determined by the Tfs Staff.

Kicking off our Best of 2011 picks is Tfs President & Managing Editor Dan Mecca, who braved theaters this year for better or worse to review such big releases as Jack and Jill, Fright Night and Captain America, has filled his Top 10 list with daring debuts, spectacular sophomore efforts, and stunning masterworks from some of cinema’s most celebrated auteurs. His picks here are alternately quirky and insightful.

Ceremony (2010) An Honorable Mention on Dan’s list, Max Winkler’s offbeat comedy also earned a spot on our Top 10 Directorial Debuts for, “Operating with a level...

"Romanian films set in the era after the fall of Communism suggest the nation suffers a hell of a hangover from the ideology," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "For instance, Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective attacks draconian drug laws left over from the old regime. Tuesday, After Christmas presents a very different vision of Romania. Its characters can afford to buy expensive Christmas gifts; one of them picks up a 3,300 Euro telescope. It may not be entirely accurate to call the film apolitical, but the most political thing about it is its avoidance of Eastern European miserabilism and its depiction of people who could be living much the same lifestyles in Western Europe."

Damon Smith introduces an interview with director Radu Muntean for Filmmaker: "Tuesday, After Christmas, which premiered at Cannes last year, opens on a dreamy scene: sunlight bathes a naked couple, middle-aged Paul (Mimi Branescu) and pretty,...

[Editor's Note: Lorber Films is releasing Tuesday, After Christmas at the Film Forum today -- this interview originally took place back in October of 2010. Additionally, here is footage from the world premiere night in Cannes back in May of 2010.] It was on a Tuesday night I had the pleasure of attending a reception hosted by the Romanian Cultural Institute of New York to honor directors Cristi Puiu and Radu Muntean, actors Mirela Oprisor, Mimi Branescu, producers Bobby Paunescu and Dragos Vilcu, and DPs Tudor Lucaciu and Viorel Sergovici. The event was a celebration of the three selected films at the Nyff: doc film The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu and the pair of narratives, Aurora and Tuesday, After Christmas. It was great to meet and talk with all of these filmmakers because they are truly at the forefront of one of the most exciting movements in international cinema, still relevant and vibrant since Cristi Puiu's Stuff and Dough and Cristian Mungiu's Occident landed in the Cannes' Director's Fortnight editions of 2001 and 2002. Late last week, I had the even greater pleasure of interviewing the team behind the Un Certain Regard selected Tuesday,...

Too often in the movies, affairs are either blithely romanticized in the grand European tradition of middlebrow “passion” films (The French Lieutenant’s Woman comes to mind) or used as a teaching tool to bludgeon audiences into accepting a damning moral perspective on the consequences of extramarital activity. (See Little Children, for instance.) Life has its own current, though, and the nature of relationships sometimes follows a pattern that is chaotic and irrational, messy and perturbing, where the boundaries between love and naked contempt (ah, Godard!) are no longer discernible. Movies from Voyage to Italy all the way down to Maren Ade’s Everyone Else have portrayed intra-relationship dynamics with emotional honesty and astute insight, leaving us with memorable impressions of love in a state of deterioration, or foundering on the shoals of time. In his fourth feature film, Romanian filmmaker Radu Muntean (Boogie, The Paper Will Be Blue) again...

If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle was the big winner at the 5th edition of Gopo Awards (Romania's film industry honours) last night, winning seven awards, including Best Film, Best Director (Florin Şerban) and Best Supporting Actress (Clara Vodă). Titus Muntean's Kino Caravan was a surprising winner of four Gopos for Best Original Music, Best Production Design, Best Costumes and Best Make-up. On the other side, Victor Rebengiuc winning Best Actor for his performance in Medal of Honor was no surprise. While Mirela Oprişor received Best Actress award, the only Gopo award for Radu Munean's Tuesday, after Christmas. George Piştereanu impressed the jury, winning the Most Promising Newcomer for his performance in If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle. Adrian Sitaru took home the award for Best Shortfilm – The Cage, and Andrei Ujică's The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu winning the Best Documentary category was not much of a surprise at all either.

It was on a Tuesday night I had the pleasure of attending a reception hosted by the Romanian Cultural Institute of New York to honor directors Cristi Puiu and Radu Muntean, actors Mirela Oprisor, Mimi Branescu, producers Bobby Paunescu and Dragos Vilcu, and DPs Tudor Lucaciu and Viorel Sergovici. The event was a celebration of the three selected films at the Nyff: doc film The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu and the pair of narratives, Aurora and Tuesday, After Christmas. It was great to meet and talk with all of these filmmakers because they are truly at the forefront of one of the most exciting movements in international cinema, still relevant and vibrant since Cristi Puiu's Stuff and Dough and Cristian Mungiu's Occident landed in the Cannes' Director's Fortnight editions of 2001 and 2002. Late last week, I had the even greater pleasure of interviewing the team behind the Un Certain Regard selected Tuesday,...

Not unlike Camerman, the documentary about accomplished cinematographer Jack Cardiff, Martin Scorsese’s A Letter To Elia, an hour-long half docu-ography/half diary entry regarding the life and movies of Elia Kazan, is a movie for strictly film festivals and the DVD collections of those that regularly attend film festivals.

The doc, written and directed by Scorsese and Kent Jones (writer for The Daily Show), doesn’t tell us anything new about Kazan’s highly-debated Black List days or how he felt about them (he’s recorded calling it the choice between two impossible choices) or even the trajectory of his film career. Instead, it offers a passionate look at the man’s canon from an equally immortal filmmaker and admirer.

Scorsese talks for the majority of the doc, and when the camera’s on him he speaks directly into the audience. The filmmaker speaks over dozens of clips from Kazan’s movies,...

On the eve of it's North American Nyff premiere, Lorber Films have scooped up the rights to Tuesday, After Christmas, and are setting it up with a May release (at the Film Forum). For those who might be wondering why the portrait is showing in May, and say, not December, is because the Cannes-selected film isn't a holiday-themed picture but instead, a marriage drama. Directed by Radu Muntean, the film contains some impressive performances from actresses Mirela Oprisor and Maria Popistasu and I personally thought was a several grades better than Muntean's previous picture Boogie. In my review I mentioned that "Muntean refrains from taking a moral stance and is more curious about what a cerebral, adulterous behaviour looks and feels like, it is in the poignant announcement sequence that is the cherry of the film -- we are treated to a long take that culminates in years of one's...

Director Nikola Lezaic has triumphed at the 2010 Sarajevo Film Festival after his drama Tilva Ros claimed the Best Film title at the event in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The movie, about two teenagers growing up in a struggling mining town in eastern Serbia, was awarded the Heart of Sarajevo prize on Saturday, marking the end of the nine-day festival.

Tilva Ros also earned its young star Marko Todorovic the Best Actor accolade, while Mirela Oprisor walked away with the Best Actress honour for her role in Romanian film Marti, Dupa Craciun (Tuesday, After Christmas).

Hollywood star Morgan Freeman was the guest of honour at the 16th annual ceremony and met with local filmmakers on Saturday ahead of a screening of his Oscar-nominated movie Invictus, in which he portrays former South African president Nelson Mandela.

Regardless of me never hearing about either of these actresses prior to seeing the film, Mirela Oprisor (small part in Coppola's Youth Without Youth) and Maria Popistasu (David Yates' television series Sex Traffic) landed major roles and delivered pitch perfect performances in Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas. Oprisor plays the part of the one unaware of bad news about to hit her, while Popistasu plays the part of the one ready to make her own future in this triage drama. The film should find other film festival venues, but I expect both thesps to make further inroads in Romanian and other Euro projects. - #4. Mirela Oprisor and Maria Popistasu Regardless of me never hearing about either of these actresses prior to seeing the film, Mirela Oprisor (small part in Coppola's Youth Without Youth) and Maria Popistasu (David Yates' television series Sex Traffic) landed major roles and delivered...

#4. Mirela Oprisor and Maria Popistasu Regardless of me never hearing about either of these actresses prior to seeing the film, Mirela Oprisor (small part in Coppola's Youth Without Youth) and Maria Popistasu (David Yates' television series Sex Traffic) landed major roles and delivered pitch perfect performances in Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas. Oprisor plays the part of the one unaware of bad news about to hit her, while Popistasu plays the part of the one ready to make her own future in this triage drama. The film should find other film festival venues, but I expect both thesps to make further inroads in Romanian and other Euro projects.    ...