AFI FEST Los Angeles International Film Festival 2009

In a collaboration unique in Romania’s burgeoning cinema, Razvan Radulescu (from Romania) and Melissa de Raaf (from the Netherlands) have co-written and directed a simple yet rich story confined to a single day. It dawns for Felicia (Ozana Oancea) with expectations that her sister will drive her to the Bucharest airport for her flight to Amsterdam, where Felicia has lived with her husband and son for years. The sister flakes out, triggering a chain of frustrating complications that conspire to keep Felicia waiting with her excessively protective yet well-intentioned mother (Ileana Cernat) at the airport. Radulescu, who has worked as a writer with Cristi Puiu, Radu Muntean and Cristian Mungiu, says that he and de Raaf’s goal was “to shape the day of Felicia’s departure into a hallmark for her life condition.” Even by the extraordinarily high standard of Romanian film acting, Oancea and Cernat attain rare levels of emotional honesty.

–Robert Koehler