A review of director Bogdan Mureșanu’s feature debut, The New Year That Never Came (2024), which had its world premiere in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival.

Cannes  and Locarno were the festivals that validated the few films of the New Romanian Cinema that dealt with communism – 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006) by Corneliu Porumboiu, The Paper Will Be Blue (2006) by Radu Muntean, The Way I Spent the End of the World (2006) by Cătălin Mitulescu, and, of course, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) by Cristian Mungiu. The fact that they came out almost at the same time, coupled with their international success, left the impression, especially among Romanian audiences, that there had been a whole wave of films on the subject and that the theme had been exhausted.

But now, several years later, a new generation of filmmakers seems to be emerging, unafraid to delve into the communist period in which they were born and grew up. This desire to present their own perspective is, after all, only natural. They, too, are receiving validation from major festivals, a sign that stories about this past still have the potential to spark interest.

In 2022, Metronom by Alexandru Belc won the directing award in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. And at this year’s Venice Film Festival, which has recently opened up to Romanian cinema (though not yet in the main competition), Bogdan Mureşanu’s debut film The New Year That Never Came was selected in the Orizzonti section (Venice’s equivalent to Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, both dedicated to new voices in world cinema).

Bogdan Mureșanu doesn’t stick to a single narrative thread, which might unfold into a commentary on the mechanisms of an entire totalitarian society (as in his famous 2018 short film The Christmas Gift, from which he takes excerpts and re-edits into the new film). He builds several stories, set on a single day just before the outbreak of the Romanian Revolution in Bucharest, intertwining them at a fast pace (some characters are connected, while others only cross paths).

These small narratives, which focus on protagonists of different ages, occupations, and social categories, are designed to cover as many essential, revealing aspects of life under communism as possible, offering a complex portrait of the regime’s end: the desire of young people to flee the country, censorship and propaganda in television and theatre, demolitions and their effects, and various forms of dysfunctional family relationships (husband-wife, children-parents).

But the tone is not didactic – except for a few dialogues that feel explanatory, The New Year That Never Came is not an illustrative stroll through a museum of communism or a school textbook. That’s because the director’s perspective is not a cold, detached, outsider’s view. On the contrary, we are invited to immerse ourselves in the increasingly degraded day-to-day existence at the end of ’89.

The characters (and their events) are compelling and human, without being heroic – each has their own drama: from the two boys (Andrei Miercure and Vlad Ionuţ Popescu) who want to escape across the border and the factory worker (Adrian Văncică) put in a difficult position by his own child, to the theatre actress (Nicoleta Hâncu) subjected to miserable professional obligations (probably the most disturbing story), the lonely old woman (Emilia Dobrin) forced to move from her old house into an apartment building, the secret police officer (Iulian Postelnicu) caught between family and work duties, and the disillusioned TV director (Mihai Călin).

The film successfully conveys the overwhelming sensation that no aspect of people’s private or social lives – from children to retirees –  escapes the influence of politics. The regime touches and poisons everything. Paranoia and fear are omnipresent. Hence the jadedness, even despair, that envelops each character – living in this decayed, altered society, barely holding on and where everything has become a traumatic farce, becomes unbearable (though, due to shortages, even voluntary death is not an option).

Thus, the final explosion is inevitable: the Revolution, depicted stylistically through an increasingly rapid parallel montage and, on the soundtrack, the cadence of the well-known Boléro. Meanwhile, the images are slowed down, as if to stretch out this monumental moment, and the frame widens, signalling that the characters are no longer suffocating and beginning to breathe (and we with them).

This is the only major stylistic rupture, chosen to mark the historical change. Until then, the film maintains a relatively consistent tone, despite the diversity of situations and characters, where drama blends with bitter comedy, largely derived from absurd events, and where the camera (operated by Boróka Bíró and Tudor Platon) faithfully and naturally follows the characters’ movements, making us involved witnesses to their deplorable lives.

The New Year That Never Came does not seek to settle scores with the past, nor does it treat it lightly (for example, with the liberating humour of the Tales from the Golden Age series). It aims to reconstruct fragments of life, captured just before a memorable moment when an entire system was about to collapse.

Ionuț Mareș

Journalist and film critic. Curator for some film festivals in Romania. At "Films in Frame" publishes interviews with both young and established filmmakers.