Early September is a tricky month for cinemagoers. Smaller cinemas are on a late summer/early autumn break and the open-air season is officially closed. Except for the multiplexes with their impressive selection of blockbusters, more interesting things will only start rolling again when everyone is back from vacation by mid-September, before school starts.

If you are one of the few ones stuck in Bucharest this weekend, you could catch some Romanian titles at the ever-reliable Elvira Popescu cinema on 77 Dacia Blvd.,  a small arthouse theatre belonging to the French Cultural Institute. The cinema has one of the best programmes in town and Romanian films are a constant category. If you are looking for an easy, breezy summer film, then there's no easier film around than Love Bus: cinci poveşti de dragoste din Bucureşti/Love Bus: Five Love Stories from Bucharest, an omnibus movie centering on love stories in a five different parts of the capital, an idea which is anything but original. Love Bus is just what it sounds like: easy, predictable and rather forgettable but nonetheless it's nice to see Bucharest in a more “romantic“ light.

If you feel like you've seen this kind of film a million times, then I would recommend a very different kind of film, a German-Belgian documentary on a Roma community in Transylvania. Pădurea e ca muntele, vezi?/The Forest Is Like the Mountains is a lovingly made, visually beautiful portrait of an extended family struggling to live from traditional crafts. The film is a matter of the heart for the directors, who are clearly attached to their subjects and offers thus a rather 'harmless' view of their lives, leaving out major problems the community might have. But it is nevertheless affecting and poetic. The film premiered at the International Short Film Festival in Berlin in February and here's my review of the picture for more details.

And if you are not in Bucharest but, coincidentally, in Alba Iulia, you should definitely drop by the third edition of the Alba Iulia Music & Film Festival. The event offers a nice mixture of open-air concerts and screenings in the beautifully rebuilt historic centre of Alba Iulia and for that alone it is more than a trip's worth. The fest started on Thursday and ends this Sunday, 7 September. Among the films screening from today on, you would have a good time with the amusing adaptation Sunt o babă comunistă/I'm an Old Communist Hag, the family comedy La gran familia española/Family United, or the atypical dating drama Stockholm (trailer below). The highlight would be the screening of Fritz Lang's ultra-influential silent epic Metropolis (the only way to describe it is monumental) with live music. And of course one of last year's most ravishing films, the charming and decadent La grande bellezza/The Great Beauty (trailer below), a film which will make you happy for days to come.

By Ioana Moldovan, columnist, ioana.moldovan@romania-insider.com