4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days  15
4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile

SCREENINGS

8pm   Sunday 13 April 2008
8pm   Monday 14 April 2008

Otilia and Gabita share the same room in a student dormitory.  They are colleagues at the University in this small town in Romania, during the last years of communism.  Otilia rents a room in a cheap hotel.   In the afternoon, they are going to meet a certain Mr. Bebe.  Gabita is pregnant, abortion is illegal and neither of them have passed through something like this before.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days belongs to a larger project called Tales from the Golden Age, a subjective history of communism in Romania told through its urban legends.  The project's aim is to talk about that period with no direct reference to communism but only through different stories focused on personal options in a time of misfortunes that people had to live like normal times.  4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days is the first film of the series.

BBFC advice:   Contains strong language and abortion theme

"I remember pitching up to Cannes last year, flicking through the festival’s glossy catalogue and having my interest sparked by a very stark still image and distinctly miserable extracted snatch of dialogue from a new film by an unknown – to me – Romanian director called Cristian Mungiu.  I didn’t know his earlier film, Occident, nor much about his new one apart from the reductive bar-room chatter that it was ‘about abortion’.
As it turned out, Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days was the most striking, original and memorable film of the event and justifiably won the Palme d’Or.  His film also proved to be as dark and unrelenting as that first tantalising image of two terrified young women sitting with an older man in a drab hotel room and that snippet of conversation that mentioned an aborted foetus, ample blood, hotel sheets and an urgent need for a plastic bag.

Yes, there’s no escaping the fact: this is a very grim film.  But it’s also a serious, terrifically made one that couldn’t be more sensitive to the individual and political ramifications of its horrific theme: the pressure of having to opt for a backstreet abortion in a country where terminations are strictly outlawed and so exist solely within the animal rules of the black market.  Thirty-nine-year-old writer and director Mungiu has the wider canvas of his country’s former political system on his mind, but it’s the horrible intimacy of his story that stings the most.

... Mungiu’s pacy, violent drama evokes a sense of real-time and often the director allows his scenes to play out in a single take; both approaches recall 2006’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu, also from a young Romanian director and also to be considered one of a handful of exceptional films to put Romania slap-bang on the film map in recent years."
Dave Calhoun, Timeout

UK RELEASE   11 January 2008

DIRECTOR   Cristian Mungiu

CAST   Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu, Vlad Ivanov

RUNNING TIME   113 minutes

COUNTRY   Romania

LANGUAGE   Romanian (subtitled)

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