Tales from the Golden Age | Little White Lies

Tales from the Gold­en Age

29 Oct 2009 / Released: 30 Oct 2009

Words by Matt Bochenski

Directed by Cristian Mungiu, Hanno Höfer, and Razvan Marculescu

Starring Diana Cavallioti, Radu Iacoban, and Vlad Ivanov

Three people in a kitchen, one man preparing food on a table with a pig nearby.
Three people in a kitchen, one man preparing food on a table with a pig nearby.
3

Anticipation.

A portmanteau movie! Oh: with Cristian Mungiu.

3

Enjoyment.

Sly, wry, funny and illuminating.

3

In Retrospect.

Communism is always good for a few chuckles.

This anthol­o­gy film is sly, wry, fun­ny and illuminating.

Two words to strike ter­ror into the heart of the aver­age movie fan: port­man­teau film. Two words to reignite some hope: Cris­t­ian Mungiu.

Tales From The Gold­en Age began life as a solo project for the Palme d’Or win­ner in which he planned to write and direct a fic­tion­al fea­ture base on real-life urban leg­ends from Romania’s com­mu­nist era under the rule of Nico­lae Ceauşes­cu. Instead, in a move that the col­lec­tivist sys­tem would have applaud­ed, he invit­ed four of Romania’s most promis­ing young film­mak­ers to join him.

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The result is five vignettes which, col­lec­tive­ly, paint a pic­ture of Roma­nia that is at once bleak but strange­ly nos­tal­gic. What shines through is the proud spir­it of the Roman­ian peo­ple, who found ways to endure in a sys­tem that veered unpre­dictably from the com­i­cal­ly inef­fec­tive to the stark­ly insidious.

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