Scarred Hearts is inspired by Romanian author Max Blecher's novel, which is set in 1937. It centers on Emanuel, a man in his early 20s, who spends his days at a sanatorium on the Black Sea coast, suffering from bone tuberculosis. Falling in love with another patient, he narrates his and his fellow patients' attempts to live life to the full as their bodies slowly wither but their minds refuse to give in. Blecher wrote the text, hailed as a masterpiece on publication in Romania in 1939, as autobiographical notes before he died, after 10 years of suffering, at the age of 29.
The Dead Nation is a documentary-essay, which shows a stunning collection of photographs from a Romanian small town in the 1930's and 1940's. The soundtrack, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, shows us what the photographs do not: the rising of the anti-Semitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust, a topic which is not very talked about in the contemporary Romanian society.
"I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians." These words, spoken in the Council of Ministers of the summer of 1941, started the ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front. The film attempts to comment on this statement.
A group of freshmen in an orthodox college are introduced in a world of cons, pleasure and money, but they soon discover that's not the way one's life should be lead.
Federica, a clumsy and graceless Italian director, had her first epileptic seizure on Christmas Day 1989, while watching the execution of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena Ceausescu on television. Since childhood, her only passion was cinema, and one film in particular played an important role: Hal Hartley's Simple Men (1992), in which Romanian actress Elina Löwensohn has an onscreen seizure. For Federica, it was a critical moment of reflection and connection. Years later, Federica has the opportunity to make a film in Bucharest about the life of her long-time icon. But the real Elina Löwensohn is much different from the one in Federica's imagination and, very quickly, the true characters of both the actor and the director are revealed. Seeing through a new lens, Federica's mind becomes clouded and her ideas for the film less clear. Mid-production, she has a fit of epilepsy, and, with her vision blurred, the faint lines between life and art fade entirely.