Graduation

Cristian Mungiu's Graduation (Bacalaureat) shared the Best Director prize at Cannes 2016 with Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper. The film extended Mungiu's continuing examination of contemporary Romanian moral life (after 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Beyond the Hills) and consolidated his position as one of the major European auteurs of his generation. The film was Romania's official Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film.

Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni), a provincial doctor in a small Transylvanian city, has spent eighteen years preparing his daughter Eliza (Maria-Victoria Dragus) for a single moment: her secondary-school graduation exam, on whose marks her British university scholarship depends. The morning before the exam, Eliza is attacked outside the school gate. The film follows Romeo's attempt across the next few days to prevent the attack from derailing Eliza's exam performance, through a slowly accumulating sequence of favours, lies, and the kind of mid-tier institutional corruption that contemporary Romanian society has largely normalised.

The film operates simultaneously as procedural-realist character study, contemporary Romanian moral document, and meditation on parental projection. Mungiu's commitment to long static handheld takes (Tudor Vladimir Panduru's photography), restrained pacing, and the absolute absence of non-diegetic music produced a register that the Romanian New Wave had refined across the previous decade. Titieni's central performance (heavy, weary, finally bewildered) is among the most distinguished in recent Romanian cinema.