Beyond the Hills

Cristian Mungiu followed his Palme d'Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days with Beyond the Hills (2012), which took the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes and a shared Best Actress award for its two leads. Based on real events at a Moldavian convent, it confirmed Mungiu as a central figure of the Romanian New Wave.

Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan play the two young women — one a nun, one an outsider unable to accept the cloistered life that has claimed her friend — in a drama that builds with terrible inevitability. Mungiu shoots in long, austere takes and natural light, refusing to demonise either the desperate visitor or the well-meaning religious community whose dogma proves catastrophic. The film withholds judgement even as the situation curdles, locating tragedy in incomprehension rather than villainy.

Critics admired its moral rigour and its refusal of melodrama, reading it as a study of faith, love and institutional failure. Demanding and quietly harrowing, Beyond the Hills exemplifies the Romanian New Wave's commitment to patient observation and unresolved difficulty. It is the work of a director who trusts the audience to sit with hard questions, and who finds in a single doomed friendship the fault lines of an entire society. Its refusal to villainise either the desperate outsider or the devout community gives the tragedy its terrible weight, and it remains a defining work of the Romanian New Wave's patient, unflinching realism.