The Anonimul International Film Festival will bring the Danube Delta to life once again, between the 9th and 15th of August. Alongside its traditional Romanian and international short film competitions, the festival is also giving a head start to two other local short films which were in competition this year at Cannes, in a separate side-bar. In short, both films are very good, and will certainly be unmissable experiences between two rounds of sea-bathing. And now for the long explanation…

Andrei Epure’s Intercom 15 is a slow-burning tour de force, with the attention to details and rigor of a filmmaker who is interested in fundamental questions: how do you construct a space by using a camera’s lens? What is the precise spot in which a camera must sit? And so on. Which is truly admirable in an industry that is oftentimes disinterested in theoretical discussions, which usually just jumps head-first into “storytelling”. Epure seems to be a filmmaker who is preoccupied in the gestures of his craft – a good sign, since what else is the short format if not the ideal playground where more or less fastidious things (a career, a recognizable style, all sorts of expectations) still have the consistency of play-dough, and, for the moment, everything can still be restarted from a clean slate? With Intercom 15, Epure does much more than simply test the waters: he introduces a destabilizing cinema in the ugly reality that we are all seeking to forget inside the screening room, showcasing an artistic intelligence which I hope to see in full bloom further down the road.

The film’s beginning shows us a woman lying on the exterior ground floor of an apartment building with a large, wooden door. The shot is static, people come and go out of its frame with indifference, with a lax program in mind: some are minding their own morning jogging routine, some go back to their wives with flowers in their hands; some time passes before someone notices the woman on the ground, hidden away in a corner. The idea is simple: the film toys around with the long shot, but the movements within are sufficiently airy – sufficiently plausible – for the entire story to avoid the sensation of a heavy-handed choreography and to seek that which is characteristic to observational cinema. When a few female neighbors finally approach the woman, speculating in all directions (one blames alcohol, the other pills), the film’s success is marvelous, to the degree to which the incident doesn’t become – as in the case of Adi Voicu’s The Last Trip to the Seaside – a relevant and enlightening capsule of Romanian society, but just a simple incident in an urban block of flats. It seems like the director is well aware of the risks of such a wager, which compresses reality into predefined models: his characters are rounded and carrying with them God-knows-what kind of secrets.

One of the film’s great advantages is its nonchalance towards its loose threads. We would expect that the blender of neighborhood gossip would devour this destiny which ended in misery, but we only discover the bare pieces of a biographical puzzle that is hardly intelligible: a former teacher of Latin, she had to leave towards somewhere at one point, is called “The Hobo” even though she lives in apartment number 15. It’s interesting how the dialogue (which is very good) is here a simple pretext for the occurrence of the supernatural: someone swears that they saw something moving beneath the cellophane. Was it the wind? Was it the woman, who might not be so dead after all, in spite of all medical knowledge? A modest deflagration of senses takes place here, liberating the film and bestowing wings upon it. It’s worth seeing what heights these wings will carry Andrei Epure to, in the future.

You know how it goes: you only have to open your ears to your surroundings in order to be overwhelmed by all sorts of incredible stories. And what better place for this than a taxi, a tiny space where everyone lets their mouths run wild, in the hopes that time will fly by a little bit faster? People ranging from Jarmush to Kiarostami know this all too well: when you’re at a loss for ideas – or when you’re tired of wasting film stock –, the cockpit is the best friend of a dialogue-heavy script. And that is what Carina Dașoveanu also knows, whose short film Love Stories on the Move was awarded third place at Cannes’ Cinéfondation section. Here, we see Ilinca Hărnuț as a well-meaning taxi driver, who is running out of gas in her own love story and is going for refills on the road, by listening to others. Her slightly guttural voice, her large smile, her voluptuousness in capturing a kind character make her ideal for this job. Some passengers are adorable (a little old man talking about stories from long ago, about silk tights), others are vaguely irritating (a teen-aged couple of lovers who are inevitably stupid), but the taxi is democratic, hosting all of them without any kind of resentment.

Love Stories on the Move is a slightly unbalanced film: the taxi scenes leave only a little bit of space for a series of pretty weak exchanges between Ilinca Hărnuț and Andi Vasluianu, and their on-screen chemistry is a bit doubtful. But these hesitations still reveal a freshness of perspective and a wish to sabotage academic approaches: the film is chock full of ideas, and the fact that some work better while others fare worse makes the film’s experimental quality seem even stronger. Since an imperfect film, but one in which you can feel a beating heart, is always preferable to a perfect, yet cold flick. In a review of the film, Irina Trocan notices the rather too conventional dynamics of this couple in which the woman is dreaming of a more romantic state of affairs, while the man remains stingy – but I must say that it is endearing to run into a character who still believes in something and hasn’t yet given up in spite of the daily battles with the vices of a life that is not at all materially satisfying. Can there still be room for love when the worries of tomorrow are always rearing their heads in the most intimate of scenes? It’s a serious question, rarely approached in Romanian films, which has an eye-catching resolution in this film.

“Intercom 15” and “Love Stories on the Move” will be screening at the Anonimul Film Festival, which will take place between the 9th  and 15th of August.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.