Cristi Puiu

  • Cristi Puiu – Moartea domnului Lazarescu AKA The Death of Mister Lazarescu (2005)

    2001-2010Cristi PuiuDramaRomania

    Quote:
    Something of a hybrid between the sardonic humor of a talkative Otar Iosseliani or Béla Tarr and the vérité-like, social realism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a thoughtful and incisive slice-of-life comedy on the impersonalization (and desensitization) of institutional health care. Exploring similar issues of entrenched bureaucracy as Moussa Bathily’s Le Certificat d’indigence that serve to impede the proper dispensation of proper medical care (and, more importantly, lose sight of the face of humanity behind human suffering), the film unfolds as an absurd subversion of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych in which the isolative process of dying becomes occluded in the pettiness, moralizing, helplessness, and coincidental distractions that invariably occupy everyday life as the lonely widower and retired engineer, Larazescu, is scuttled from one hospital to another throughout the evening after suffering from a bout of migraine and nausea. As in Tolstoy’s novella, the process of death does not alter the process of living, but rather, becomes only a momentary distraction in an eternal – and seemingly interminable – human comedy.Read More »

  • Cristi Puiu – Malmkrog (2020)

    2011-2020Cristi PuiuDramaRomania

    IMDb wrote:
    A landowner, a politician, a countess, a General and his wife gather in a spacious manor house and discuss death, war, progress and morality. As time passes by, the discussion becomes more serious and heated.Read More »

  • Cristi Puiu – Aurora (2010)

    2001-2010ArthouseCristi PuiuDramaRomania

    Quote:
    “There is no such thing as a murderer, only people who kill.” With these words director Cristi Puiu qualifies his careful study of contemporary Romanian society and of fatal acts such as murder. The film focuses on 42-year-old Viorel who is going through a gloomy period of life that leads him to the point of killing without it being clear whether or not it’s his divorce and his conflict with loved ones provoking him to open fire. The film attempts to demystify the act of murder, rendering it as something in no way spectacular, just as there is nothing remarkable about a person who commits murder. Read More »

  • Cristi Puiu – Sieranevada (2016)

    2011-2020Cristi PuiuDramaRomania

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    Somewhere in Bucharest, three days after the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris and forty days after his father’s death, 40-year-old doctor Lary spends one Saturday at a family gathering in memory of the deceased.
    The event does not go as planned. Discussions are heated, fierce differences of opinion arise.
    Forced to face his fears and his past, and obliged to reconsider his place in the family, Lary is left with no choice but to tell the truth… (cannes)Read More »

  • Cristi Puiu – La souris est sous la table AKA The Mouse is Under the Table (2012)

    2011-2020ArthouseCristi PuiuDramaFrance

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    IMDB:
    This is the 1st feature in the Three Exercises of Interpretation ( Trois exercices d’interprétation ) trilogy based on Three Conversations by Russian writer and philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. The actors’ ‘exercises’ developed into a minimalistic trilogy on cinema and literature, social and spiritual life, acting in film and in real life. Read More »

  • Sergei Loznitsa, Cristi Puiu, Neil Young – Focus Sergei Loznitsa (panel discussion) (2014)

    2011-2020Cristi PuiuDocumentaryNeil YoungRomaniaSergei Loznitsa

    The 2014 Astra Film Festival’s Focus Loznitsa now presents his latest documentary Maidan, alongside three of his earlier works—The Train stop(2000), Landscape (2003) and Blockade (2005)—as well as a panel discussion related to the concept of “authorship” within film-making between Sergei Loznitsa and Cristi Puiu, moderated by Neil Young (film critic, UK).

    Questions arising include:

    * What happens when the texture of the film is composed of images recorded directly from the immediate mundanity of the world around us?
    * What happens to the position of the filmaker as author engaged in an existential understanding of the world while, for example, shooting in the central square Kiev amid full revolutionary turmoil?
    * Can the film-maker avoid or resist the direct expression of his/her own political stance?
    * Cinema is established as a very strong medium and, throughout its history, has been misused as a dangerous means of mass manipulation, especially when the language of the film espouses and expresses a particular political position. What is the correct standpoint of a filmmaker as an author in this situation?
    * What is the role of a filmmaker concerned with the controversies of a society undergoing dramatic transformation?

    The panel discussion takes place after the screening of the film MaidanRead More »

  • Cristi Puiu – Un cartus de kent si un pachet de cafea AKA Cigarettes and Coffee (2004)

    2011-2020ArthouseCristi PuiuRomaniaShort Film

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    In Jim Jarmush’s Coffee and Cigarettes, friends meet to romanticize about their love for two savory customs. Cristi Puiu’s Cigarettes and Coffee turns Jarmush’s film around. Neither Fiul (Mimi Branescu), a young man dressed in a suit, nor Tatal (Victor Rebengiuc), his poor looking father, smoke or drink coffee as they meet in a bar to talk business. Instead, they have water, beer, and apple pie. And unlike the character’s in Jarmush’s film, Fiul’s and Tatal’s conflict is not to come to terms about myths on tobacco and caffeine. The old man in Puiu’s film actually has a serious problem.Read More »

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