Cristian Mungiu

How is the experience of coming back to Cannes after having won the Palme D’Or? It’s different for me now because it’s my third time in Cannes, but my first time as a producer, introducing somebody else. Now I feel a bit more responsible, and I’m a bit more nervous. But I am really glad that it was possible for us to show the film in Cannes, because it is the best place to show a film, especially a collective film… it’s difficult to find a place for it.

You are taking this project as an intermediate step between the last film you authored and the next one. Yes, after the success of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, I decided to invite directors to take this script to the screen. I deliberately went to people I knew very well and who had not had made their debut full length feature. I chose people that I knew I could work with.

And how was the job of being producer? From the beginning I was really involved in everything. I helped them a little bit with the casting, with the editing, but I wanted to give them the freedom to express their own voices - to make the film an independent art product with individual voices.

How could you define the relationship between Romanian people and humour? It was the way they discovered to survive [through] that time. The dictatorship was very harsh, but its side effects could be funny at some points. The only way to survive that period was to mock it, not taking things seriously. All the stories that we see in the movie are urban legends. People had to make queues in the morning without knowing what they were going to get; they used to make jokes about it, about Ceauşescu, etc. Everybody believed these legends and everybody was telling them with a little bit of a difference. One can understand Romanian history through the urban legends of that time, so I decided to make this subjective piece on the late Ceauşescu era through these myths.

What is the reaction of Romanian audiences when you unearth bad memories? The film has this mechanism of being nostalgic, not about the period, but about the humour. And it was very important for me to portray the harsh period as I remembered it, especially for Romanian audiences, to make them revive the humour they needed to survive. The film has not been released yet in Romania, but I think the audiences will go to see it because it is a comedy, it’s easy to digest, very evocative, and everybody at the end of the movie will have his or her personal view of the period.

Do you think this movie has the potential to be universal? I don’t know how much they could relate to making queues for food in France, for example, but lots of people from countries which have experienced this kind of problem, even if they did not have communism like this, might relate to this use of humour to stand against the abuses. [It’s] one of the ways to fight against the power, whether it is in South America, Asia, or other countries. I suppose those audiences will feel surprised at the way they relate to it.

You and Ioana Uricaru were part of the Berlinale Talent Campus some years ago. What do you think is the importance of this kind of event for young filmmakers? I believe that all the initiatives that are close to big festivals, bringing together people to talk with professionals, watching films and knowing each other, can be very fruitful - especially because they bring together people of the same age. And when somebody tells you something about your work that you had never thought about, you will understand your cinema better. I had a very good experience in the BTC by talking to people who had another idea of cinema, and I had also wonderful experiences when I brought my films to Cannes, because I had immediate feedback from people who see cinema in other ways than I do.

Natalia Ames