radu mihaileanu

Born in Bucharest on April 23, 1958, Radu Mihaileanu comes from a Jewish family. His father, Mordechaï Buchman, persecuted by the Nazis, changed his name to Ion Mihaileanu, to go unnoticed in Romania. This is how he signs his script for Dominica la ora 6 , by Lucian Pintille, about two young lovers in Hitler’s time.

The young Radu is forced to flee his country, where conditions are harsh under the Ceaucescu dictatorship. After a season in Israel, he ends up in France, where he studies at the IDHEC, Institute of Higher Cinematographic Studies, in Paris.

When he finished his studies, he began an intense stage as an assistant director, first with John Glen in A View to a Kill , Roger Moore ‘s last appearance as James Bond. Later with Marco Ferreri, in I Love You and Los negros tambien comer , and even with Fernando Trueba , in El sueño del mono loco .

He began his career as a feature filmmaker with Traitor (1993) , about a journalist imprisoned in a sordid jail in Bucharest, during the communist regime, for a subversive article. He ends up reaching a deal with his jailers to be released, and to be able to continue his life while keeping the secret of what has happened.

It won four awards at the Montreal Festival. Mihaileanu dedicates his victory to his parents, “whose story is very close to this one.”

The characters who are forced to lie to save their lives will be repeated over and over again in Mihaileanu’s filmography. In his second work, El tren de la vida , a group of Jews from Central Europe decide to follow the plan orchestrated by Schlomo, the madman of the community, who comes up with the idea that they fake their own deportation, forcing some of them to to disguise themselves as Nazis who supposedly transport the others to a concentration camp.

Despite the harshness of the central theme, the director opted for a comedy tone along the lines of a film that had been released shortly before, Life is Beautiful , also about the Holocaust. And it imitates the gypsy-like surreal tone of Emir Kusturica ‘s cinema , with the help of Goran Bregovic’s score, who worked for the Serbian on titles such as Gypsy Time and Underground . It has great international repercussion, and establishes its author in the film community.

After seven years of absence from the big screen –occupied with some telefilm–, he premieres Vete y vive , with a much more dramatic tone, but with a similar theme, since the protagonist is an Ethiopian Christian boy, whose mother pushes him to pretend to be a Jew. to flee from the famine that devastates the country, taking advantage of the fact that Israel has launched an operation to welcome children of this confession.

A producer offers him a script about a conductor retaliated by the Russian communists, who recruits his former musicians, now in survival jobs, to pose as the current Bolshoi orchestra and give a concert in Paris. He is enthusiastic about the idea, in line with his other works on characters forced to lie, but the script does not seem up to the task, so he ends up rewriting it himself with the help of Alain-Michel Blanc , who had already collaborated with him on the Ethiopian boy story. Both travel to Russia to learn first-hand details of the Soviet repression that they incorporate into the story.

Mihaileanu is aware that characters who pretend to be what they are not are repeated in his films “It is a subject that haunts me despite myself”, explains the director. “Perhaps it is due to the fact that my father changed his last name during the war to survive during the Nazi regime and then the Stalinist one. But I lived all that in a positive way, there is a conflict between these two identities in me. For On the other hand, I have suffered for a long time from being considered a “foreigner”, no matter where I am – in France or in Romania. Today, I see it as an enriching element and I am happy to be everywhere, at the same time inside and outside”.

The women’s fountain stars another group that rebels against injustice, the inhabitants of a village who carry water from a source located on a mountain since time immemorial, even though such an effort causes them problems such as losing their babies when they are pregnant. In an interesting typical Mihaileanu subplot, a character lies in some letters with good intentions. Although dealing with the situation of women in the Islamic world could have unleashed controversy in certain countries, it was successful in them thanks to the fact that it achieves a friendly, non-offensive tone (despite some harsh passage on domestic violence), and also to which does not specify in which specific country the action takes place.