The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu won the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes 2005 and is now treated as the foundational work of the Romanian New Wave. The film established the visual and tonal grammar that would define the wave's subsequent breakthroughs (Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Palme d'Or 2007), Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest, Călin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose, Radu Jude's later work) all of which adopted variations on Puiu's deliberately drained, fluorescent-lit, long-take observational style.

The lead, Ion Fiscuteanu, was a veteran Romanian theatre actor in his late sixties at the time of the shoot; this was his most internationally visible role before his death in 2007, only two years after the film's release. The screenplay is by Puiu and Răzvan Rădulescu, who would also write Călin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose and several other Romanian wave landmarks. Cinematography is by Oleg Mutu, who would shoot Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days two years later, Mutu's photographic style across both films is one of the central visual signatures of the wave.

The film was shot largely in real Bucharest hospital corridors with documentary-style direction across a forty-five-day schedule. Puiu has stated in interviews that the entire script was developed from a real-life incident he had witnessed personally. The Romanian New Wave's emergence in the late 2000s is widely treated in academic film studies as one of the most coherent and rapid national-cinema formations of the twenty-first century, comparable in significance to the South Korean New Wave of the same period.