The Romanian Cultural Institute in Berlin has been very active in the film department in the past years and their biggest project is an annual series on Romanian cinema. The event is called Rekonstruktion. Filmland Rumänien (the translation would be along the lines of Reconstruction. Romania, Land of Filmmaking) and the title has never been more fitting than this year, for the series' third edition, which took place from 21 to 30 November.

To celebrate 25 years from the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Reconstruction has screened 17 featured from and about the years surrounding the events and the years before and after, reaching to contemporary social and political issues. It was a major occasion and the selection was solid, with a lot of good classics, some new titles, and more than one masterpiece.

The opening film was Radu Muntean's debut, a funny, absurd and poignant film on the confusion of the days when the Revolution was happening and Bucharest was a chaos. Hârtia va fi albastră/The Paper Will Be Blue is a great film to open the series and all its elements are found in many of the other films screened: the mixture of fiction and documentary elements, the black sense of humour typical of the Romanian social dramas of the past decades, the personal stories reflecting a broader picture, the aesthetics of the so-called New Wave (camera, lighting) and the reliance on a perfectly written script.

The programme's outstanding pictures were Cristian Mungiu's fearless, ruthless and perfect 4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile/4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a devastating and thrilling tale about an abortion gone hellish in the bleak 1980s, and Corneliu Porumboiu's wonderfully dry was-it-or-was-it-not-a-revolution comedy A fost sau n-a fost?/12:08 East of Bucharest. Andrei Ujică, a Romanian-born filmmaker based in Germany, has no less than two films present, the monumental and eye-opening Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceaușescu/The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu, in which he works with archive material to deconstruct the myth of the dictator to suprising and strangely amusing effects, and his collaboration with German documentarist Harun Farocki, the brilliant reconstruction of a chronology of the Revolution as shown on television, Videogramme einer Revolution/Videograms of a Revolution.

The 1990s are represented by solid features such as Lucian Pintilie's Prea târziu/Too Late or Mircea Daneliuc's Senatorul melcilor/The Snail's Senator but their impact is similar to the era they originated from: it's more subdued than what was before and definitely what was about to happen afterwards, with the explosion of the 'Romanian New Wave'.

Contemporary problems are shown as a consequence of earlier decades and films such as Anatomia unei plecări/Anatomy of a Departure or București, unde ești?/Where Are You Bucharest? may not be too challenging or impressive from a filmmaking point of view (they are, sadly, the weakest part of the selection, making you wonder whether calmer times don't tend to produce safer films) but their issues are worth considering.

In the past years, the series left me more or less underwhelmed since it seemed a random selection of films with few stand-outs but this year's Reconstruction was spot-on.

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