Cristi Puiu is no stranger to fame at home and abroad. In 2004, when he was still in the beginning of his career, he got the Golden Bear at Berlin for his short film Cigarettes and Coffee/Un cartuș de Kent și un pachet de cafea.

His debut film Stuff and Dough/Marfa şi Banii from 2001 was quite popular in Romania, while his later works, The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu/Moartea domnului Lăzărescu from 2005 and Aurora from 2010 became award magnets.

In Aurora, Puiu also played the main male character, Viorel.

Puiu was born in 1967 in Bucharest, capital of Romania. He is married, and has three children. A writer and director, he is the founder of movie production company Mandragora, which he created in 2004 with his wife Anca Puiu and Alex Munteanu.

As a child, he studied painting, and was even admitted to the Ecole Superieure d'Arts Visuels in Geneve, in the Painting department, but left the department at the end of the first year, to pursue film at the same school, which he graduated in 1996.