Rising Romanian Talents Ready for an International Breakthrough

Borțun describes cinema as “a very human experience, with all the ups and the downs,” and has had the track record in her young career to prove it. Six years ago she scrapped together €500 ($590) to make her first short film, “Blue Spring”; this year her latest short, “When Night Meets Dawn,” premiered in the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section. For Borțun, it’s all part of the journey. “Cinema functions for me as a way of better understanding things I don’t otherwise know how to make sense of,” she tells Variety. “So I would say it’s a way of gaining knowledge about myself and the world.” Fresh off her Cannes success, the writer-director is prepping her first feature, “Blue Banks,” about a poor village woman who’s forced to leave her son behind when she finds a job in Marseille. “I guess I’m looking at places we don’t usually feel comfortable to look at,” she says. “For me, cinema should be a form of dialogue in which not everything is immediately understood.”

Raised by theater-loving parents, Huțuleac took to performance at an early age, when visits to the theater were an almost weekly occurrence and he “instantly fell in love with the phenomenon,” he tells Variety. One day during childhood his father brought home a handycam for the young Huțuleac to experiment with. “I started to write, act and direct my own short videos,” he says. “I have, honestly and equally, loved both theater and film ever since.” After a successful start as an actor Huțuleac switched to directing. But while his feature debut “#dogpoopgirl” took home the top prize at the Moscow Film Festival this year, Huțuleac admits he “still feel[s] like an outsider” looking to prove himself in the director’s chair. He’s currently financing his next feature and looking for a chance to write and direct a crime drama series. “I think that, especially when you start out, you have to have a certain rhythm of creation,” he says. “Vocational training is best done through practical experience. You cannot just read about making films. You have to actually make them.”

Vdovîi earned her stripes when she began working as a reporter more than a decade ago, investigating torture in separatist regions in former Soviet Republics, reporting on the war in Eastern Ukraine, and covering Russia’s presidential elections. ”I was constantly looking for ways to speak about more complex human issues, but journalism has its own limitations,” she tells Variety. “In my search for creative freedom, I turned to documentary filmmaking.” After writing the script for director Radu Ciorniciuc’s Sundance prize winner “Acasa, My Home,” Vdovîi and Ciorniciuc are now co-directing a feature film about Vdovîi’s relationship with her abusive father, which won the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award for the best pitch at CPH:DOX this year. “It is the most complicated story that I’ve been working on in my whole career because, for the first time in my life, I’m turning the camera on me,” she says. “By doing so, I hope it will open up a safe space for conversations about the cultural norms that allow violence to thrive and how we can break vicious, intergenerational cycles of abuse.”

A graduate of the National University of Theater and Film in Bucharest, Dembinski partly turned to film as a way to connect with the world around him. “I sometimes have some thoughts which I don’t feel comfortable to share with people around me,” he tells Variety. “The fact that [through film] you can share with others the view from your small window inspires me.” After his first two shorts screened in Clermont Ferrand and Locarno, Dembinski returned to the Transilvania Film Festival this year with his latest, “In the Name of the Father,” starring veteran Romanian screen stars Vlad Ivanov and Diava Cavallioti. Now developing his feature debut, “Crissea IV,” a love story set in a small town on the Danube Delta, the writer-director says he’s not too concerned about what sort of professional accolades the future might have in store. “I don’t think that much about the industry,” he says. “I’m more focused to find the best way to tell my story.”

An award winner for her star turn in Hüseyin Tabak’s German drama “Gypsy Queen,” Șerban says she became an actress “because I used to create imaginary alternatives for myself in order to escape from my difficult reality as a Roma,” which included poverty and rampant discrimination. Last year she made her directorial debut with the short film “Letter of Forgiveness,” the first film about Roma slavery written and directed from a female Roma perspective. Describing it as her goal “to create and claim space for Roma stories exposed in an unstereotypical, non-exotic way,” Șerban says she became a director “because I felt the need to put in the world stories I myself needed to see when I was little, when I was bullied and ashamed to be a Roma girl.” She’s currently developing “Letter of Forgiveness” and another short, “I Matter,” into feature-length films. “Through the stories I tell in my films, I aim to show our humanity as Roma, who still represent the most discriminated minority in Europe, and to instill hope in whomever needs it,” she says.

Epure’s path to the director’s chair “happened gradually and involuntarily,” he tells Variety. “I had all sorts of curiosities and I got to cinema through others forms of art, like literature and photography.” It was while studying film that Epure discovered transcendental cinema, which “triggered something in me” and prompted him to become a filmmaker. The emerging director had a breakout year in 2021, with his debut short, “Maybe Darkness Will Cover Me,” premiering in Moscow just weeks before the short film “Intercom 15” bowed in the Critics’ Week section of the Cannes Film Festival. Epure is currently writing the script of his feature debut, “Don’t Let Me Die,” an expansion on his Cannes short about the residents of an apartment block who discover an unconscious woman on the pavement. “My challenge is to merge the New Romanian Cinema with horror and fantasy, trying to create a new genre,” he says.

An award-winning theater director, Jebeleanu came to film almost by chance, after a fortuitous phone call from a producer who had a script for him to read. That would in turn become “Poppy Field,” his feature film debut, which bowed at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival before going on to a healthy festival career. The first-time director says he knew from the start that he was “at the right position in the right moment” to tell the story of a closeted police officer forced to confront his dual identities during an anti-gay protest at a Bucharest movie theater. An openly gay filmmaker in a country where LGBTQ rights are still a battlefield, Jebeleanu says he hopes his films “will lead to reflections about our society’s struggles.” “I want to bring to my film projects stories of minority people, vulnerable and disturbed characters,” he tells Variety. “I will continue to fight for human rights with my films.”