Following up his stellar, 3.5-hour drama Malmkrog, Romanian director Cristi Puiu has premiered his latest film MMXX at San Sebastian Film Festival. Portraying four short stories and four moments in time capturing the wanderings of a few souls, stuck at the crossroads of history, we’re now pleased to exclusively premiere the film’s first trailer.
Here’s the synopsis: “Oana Pfifer, a young therapist, gradually slips into the net of the questionnaire she submits to her patient. Mihai, Oana’s brother, worrying about his birthday, is stuck in a story far bigger than he can handle. Septimiu, Oana’s husband, concerned about his health, vaguely listens to a strange story his colleague was caught up in a while ago. Narcis Patranescu, an organized crime detective, deals with an unsettling dark story while interrogating a young woman at a funeral.”
“I don’t understand the world,” the director recently told Cineuropa. “Everything seems to me like a joke, unserious. And I don’t understand why we are silent about it. It’s like being silent about evil. We have dealt with evil and we still are dealing with it. You might think you are on the good side of history, but that’s not true. We are just collaborators of evil, and I realized this during this pandemic. The limits of our honesty towards ourselves and others, the limits of our love for others. This egoistic drive that makes a potential killer out of anyone, if we can say so. It didn’t happen, but it could happen. And we just had to live through this moment, which was quite soft if we compare it to World War II, to the war in Yugoslavia some years ago, to the current wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine.”
See the exclusive trailer below and read our review of the film here.
MMXX premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival.