Afterimage: Corneliu Porumboiu

November 8–16, 2018

The Romanian filmmaker who has been called “one of our great contemporary observers of the human comedy” (Variety) visits BAMPFA to present and discuss his work.

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12:08 East of Bucharest
The Treasure
Police, Adjective
When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
Infinite Football

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
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Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
- Friday, November 16 7 PM
Corneliu Porumboiu
Romania, 2013
Imported 35mm Print

Continuing his very particular parsing of language and politics—here, the politics are cinematic—Porumboiu follows a film director rehearsing the details of a nude scene with his lead actress.
Infinite Football
- Sunday, November 11 3:30 PM
Corneliu Porumboiu
Romania, 2017
Perhaps the purest expression of one of Porumboiu’s favorite themes, rules vs. freedom, Infinite Football documents an unassuming bureaucrat with a unique extracurricular passion: attempting to revolutionize the rules of football.

Corneliu Porumboiu in Person
12:08 East of Bucharest
- Saturday, November 10 5:30 PM
Corneliu Porumboiu
Romania, 2006
A provincial TV talk show turns into a battle over the history of the Romanian revolution in Porumboiu’s hilarious allegory, winner of Cannes’ Caméra d’Or.

Corneliu Porumboiu and Mona Nicoară in Conversation
Police, Adjective
- Friday, November 9 7 PM
Corneliu Porumboiu
Romania, 2009
The Wire in Romania; Serpico with a thesaurus: a beat cop tails a teenage pot smoker around town, and engages his superiors in verbal battles about law, language, and justice. “Extraordinary” (Variety).

Corneliu Porumboiu and Mona Nicoară in Conversation
The Treasure
- Thursday, November 8 7:30 PM
Corneliu Porumboiu
Romania, 2015
Two cash-strapped neighbors rent a metal detector to search for treasure that may or may not be buried at one’s family home in this disarming, deadpan parable on bureaucracy, hope, and unearthing the past. “A movie that lives up to its name” (New York Times).

Corneliu Porumboiu in Person

Afterimage: Corneliu Porumboiu

November 8–16, 2018

“Porumboiu’s particular brand of farce is always shot through with the pulse of everyday life and its Sisyphean struggles. He is, simply put, one of our great contemporary observers of the human comedy.”—Scott Foundas, Variety

Corneliu Porumboiu first came to the attention of international audiences after winning the Caméra d’Or at Cannes for his 2006 first feature, 12:08 East of Bucharest. That film depicts the airing of a provincial television show that commemorates the sixteenth anniversary of the 1989 revolution that ousted dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu by inviting a duo of local “experts” (an alcoholic, debt-ridden teacher and a pensioner best known for playing Santa Claus at children’s parties) to participate in a decidedly parochial, but slyly hilarious, debate. Momentous events also linger in the background of Porumboiu’s subsequent films, which focus on the mundane challenges faced by ordinary people in everyday life. The FIPRESCI prizewinning Police, Adjective, in which an earnest cop tries, in spite of orders from his superiors, to do the right thing, and The Treasure, where mismatched neighbors embark on an unlikely hunt for buried booty, exemplify this approach. While Porumboiu’s films chronicle the absurdities of life in postcommunist Romania, the questions they raise and the experiences they depict are universally relevant. Philosophy collides with comedy in scenarios that illustrate the challenges inherent to human communication and the difficulty of finding truth and freedom in the margins of official history and individual memory, institutional imperatives and personal conscience, dogma and imagination.

Porumboiu will present four of his films and will be joined in conversation by documentary filmmaker, writer, film curator, and activist Mona Nicoară after the screenings of Police, Adjective and 12:08 East of Bucharest.

Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

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Series organized by Associate Film Curator Kate MacKay. Afterimage: Filmmakers and Critics in Conversation is made possible by generous funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association®. Thanks to Jeff Pennington, Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, UC Berkeley; Pavle Levi and Jovana Knezevic, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Stanford University; Laura Toma, Suzan Negip-Schatt, Ludwig Galambos, and Florentina Mocanu, Romanian Film Festival at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and San Francisco State University; Professor Steve Kovacs, Department of Cinema, San Francisco State University; Dana Beldiman, honorary consul general, and George Roth, honorary consul, Honorary Consulate of Romania in San Francisco; Allan B. Cruse, professor emeritus, University of San Francisco; Casa Romana; Ramona Grama, 42km Film; Schendel Films; and Barbro Osher.

Afterimage: Corneliu Porumboiu

November 8–16, 2018

Past Films

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism

Infinite Football

12:08 East of Bucharest

Police, Adjective

The Treasure