"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days", by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and got a kiss from ageless Jane Fonda in glittering red-carpet ceremony to end the 12-day most celebrated film festival in the world.

"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" uses agony of abortion for the illustration of political crisis in the history of Romania.

On "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"


The film's story centres on two girls on a Saturday in 1987 and follows them from morning to night as one of them prepares to have an illegal abortion. "It is a story I know from my early 20s, which was happening in the last years of Communism," Mungiu explains. "There is no direct reference to Communism or Ceaucescu, but, of course, there is a context which influences their decisions. Basically, it is a story about decisions and the consequences of these decisions."

In 1966, Ceaucescu had banned abortion because he wanted to have a large workforce for the future and there was a boom in births especially in the late 1960s. "I belong to such a generation", says Mungiu who was born in 1968. "I am a child that was loved, but I wasn't planned. People thought about abortion as a way of fighting Communism because this wasn't allowed, but they never took the time to think about the moral issues."

"This lasted until 1990 when one of the first measures to be implemented in the new freedom was to legalise abortion. The consequence was that, in the nineties, Romania has 1 million abortions a year, the highest figure in Europe; this has since decreased, but still have 300,000-400,000 per year."

The time from concept to completion for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days was extraordinarily short: Mungiu wrote the screenplay last summer and was wondering last September "whether or not to start the film because I knew I wanted to have it ready for Cannes."

"I started an early preparation in early November and only got the news that I had the financing from Romania in early December," he continues. "Everything was very tight and there was really no time to wait for foreign [funding] decisions because I knew that I wouldn't get a response until way after I had finished shooting." Some additional financing was subsequently provided by Claudia Tronnier of ZDF's Das kleine Fernsehspiel unit.

"I did everything on this film from the financing to executive production, but, first of all, I am a writer and director," Mungiu stresses. "I only became a producer by accident because I wanted to be in control of my films. I created my own company as I wasn't happy with the kind of producers I had met before."

Principal photography for the film was concentrated in January, and Mungiu admits that he shot a lot of film stock: "It was rather complicated because I decided to shoot everything in one take," he explains. "For example, I have one 10-minute scene with ten people at a table eating and speaking at the same time. I shot 6,000 metres over five days and threw everything away except for the last take!"

The two girls are played by Anamaria Marinca - who has become more popular in the UK than Romania after her BAFTA-winning performance in the Sex Traffic TV series - and Laura Vasiliu, a relative unknown whom Mungiu had cast in a commercial, with theatre and film actor Vlad Ivanov as the intermediary for the illegal abortion.

The Hubert Bals Fund, who had granted development support for the project, helped to organise a special screening of a rough cut for sales agents during the Rotterdam International Film Festival and Mungiu then sent out tapes to other agents at the Berlinale before finally deciding on Wild Bunch to handle the international distribution.

When the invitation to screen in the Cannes competition was officially announced towards the end of April, Mungiu was in the middle of shooting his contribution to an omnibus film Tales From The Golden Age about Romania of the 1980s under Ceaucescu, which he had originally been planned to do before 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.

Three episodes with a total running time of 90-100 minutes have so far been shot by Mungiu's Mobra Films partner Hanno Hofer, a colleague from his film school days Razvan Madulescu, and Mungiu himself. A decision will now have to be made on how many more episodes are to be shot, organising their financing and seeing in what format the film will finally be shown in the cinemas.

For the immediate future, he will be devoting his time to promoting 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days - the film is set to have its Romanian premiere during the Transilvania International Film Festival in Cluj/Sibiu in early June - and putting the finishing touches to Tales From The Golden Age.

It is likely that his company will distribute 4 Months itself in Romania as this is something that Mobra is also planning to do for Didi Danquart's Offset and Lost And Found where the company holds the Romanian rights in both cases.

But Mungiu is aware that the kind of admissions reached by his first feature Occident will be hard to top given the current state of exhibition in Romania. His feature debut had clocked up over 65,000 entries, compared to the average 45,000 which an American blockbuster could be expected to attract in Romania.

"The problem is that the number of theatres decreased so abruptly from 2002 that you can't really reach that number of admissions even with an American film," he observes. "This doesn't depend on the film; something needs to be changed in people's habits of going to the cinema and different kinds of cinemas have to be bult which offer more than just showing films. That doesn't work any more because nobody comes to these huge empty Communist cinema buildings."

Meanwhile, the international interest in Romanian cinema will be sure to continue this year as Mungiu will not be alone in Cannes: California Dreaming, the feature debut of Cristian Nemescu, who was tragically killed in a traffic accident in Bucharest last August during the film's postproduction, will have its world premiere in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section. The film was completed by Constantin Popescu.

Furthermore, Daniel Mitulescu is represented in Cannes' Atelier section with the screenplay "Unui balon in forma de inima", and director Cristi Puiu returns to Cannes two years after his internationally feted The Death of Mr Lazarescu to serve as a member of the jury for Un Certain Regard.

Whether this is indicative of the health of Romanian cinema as whole is a matter of opinion, according to Mungiu. "The Romanian cinema has two parts," he says, "the part which is healthy and another part which is invisible and yet occupies 70% of the CNC (Romania's National Film Center), producing films that are never screened abroad or really bring people to the cinemas in Romania either."

Indeed, Mungiu has been publicly critical recently about the CNC's funding policy describing it as "scandalous" that the institution had not supported the latest projects by Puiu, Razvan Radulescu or Radu Badrala.

This younger generation of filmmakers, though, are the ones who are travelling abroad, building up international networks and having an understanding of what cinema is about today. "For the past six or seven years we have produced more than one film so it is not an accident anymore," he argues. "People have expectations now of what to see from Romania and what was good is that every year there were films which managed to fulfil these expectations."


Cristian Mungiu

Born in 1968, Cristian Mungiu studied English and American Language and Literature in his home town of Iasi before attending the Academy for Film & Theatre (AFT) in Bucharest from 1994-1998 to study Film Directing. He made eight films as writer-director during his time at film school, including The Hand Of Paulista which was entered by Romania for the Student Oscar competition. His feature debut West (Occident) was shown in the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes, won 10 international awards and was invited to more than 75 festivals. He set up the company Mobra Films with Hanno Hofer and DoP Oleg Mutu in 2003, directed one of the episodes of Lost And Found and executive produced Didi Danquart's Offset. His second feature 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days was shot at the beginning of this year and was invited to the Official Competition for the 60th Cannes Film Festival.

From Berlinale Talent Campus