Event

The Oak (Balana)

Sat Apr 11: 7.30pm

Lucian Pintilie
Romania & France
1992
1h 45m
Series - The Romanians: 30 Years of Cinema Revolution
About
** New 4K restoration! **

The Oak is an absorbing, complicated black comedy about Romania at the end of the Ceauescu regime. A young schoolteacher named Nela embarks on a spiritual journey after the death of her father, a former government official, whose ashes she takes to toting in a coffee jar. On her wanderings through grotesque and often violent surroundings, she meets Mitic. The couple, like Tristan and Isolde at the gates of the Orient, cannot live out their love according to the rules. A series of events floods, pollution, Mitics arrest, military maneuvers and massacres split up our heroes, and reveal a context in which nothing works properly and everything seems to be falling apart.