3 Romanian Film Directors

trei-directori This video was found in our archives, translated into Romanian and published in Jurnal National (click here).

If you want to see the video without reading all this text, go to the end of this article (scroll down).

The Story Behind the Video:

The ending of the year (2011) seems to be a month of nostalgia, particularly in Romania where the media are wallowing in a sea of memories based on unanswered questions about the 1989 revolution. Searching for answers gives editors pages of material (the biblical phrase “old wine in new bottles” springs to mind) and characters like Petre Roman, Romania’s first post revolutionary PM, get wheeled onto TV chat shows to discuss their memories of Communism. (more…)

Memories of Bucharest in 1990

rupert-wolfe-murray-in-1990-2 In 1989 I taught myself to be a journalist (I had no idea you could study it in university). By the end of that year I was covering the Romanian revolution for Scotland on Sunday, a newspaper that was too “Scottish” to send me over to witness the action on the ground. I didn’t get here until January 1990, which I thought was far too late, but there was still plenty of drama on the streets of Bucharest. (more…)

The power of lobbies

This article was also published in Romanian on Contributors.ro

“There are two types of political lobby campaigns” explained my tutor of political science at Liverpool University, “you have the big movements with hundreds of thousands of members, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. They make a lot of noise and get media coverage, but they rarely change things. The other type of lobby is done ‘in smoke filled rooms behind closed doors’ by big business groups who have limitless funds, patience and time.” George Monbiot writes brilliantly about the evil effectiveness of the corporate lobby groups in the Guardian and there was a recent article in TIME (“Is Obama Bad for the Environment ?”) which describes how Obama is ruling in favour of Big Oil despite having been elected on a wave of pro-environmental promises. (more…)

A Day In The Life of Alina Serban

photo by Vadim Ghirda

You may be wondering why I’m writing so much about Alina Serban? Am I being paid by Hollywood (or Media Pro)? Am I in love? Have I got nothing better to do? The explanation is simple: when I went to speak with the magazine Decit o Revista they asked me what I was working on and I said “Alina Serban”, and they said “Can you do one for us too?”. So I did and here it is. Meanwhile, as an update to the article, my spies tell me that Alina is now in London attending an audition at RADA, the top British acting school.

It’s eight fifteen in the morning and I am hurrying towards the underground station at Piata Romana with Alina Serban, the dynamic young Roma actress. Alina has a puppet show at nine o’ clock at a kindergarten in the Militar area and we’re running late. We squeeze into the commuter crowd, change at Piata Victoriei and get another train to Crangasi. She calls her colleague Elena Rotaru, (more…)

Sighisoara Needs Your Help

This article was also published in Romanian on Hotnews.

Anyone who knows Romania is aware that Sighisoara is a pretty amazing place. Guidebooks describe is as the only medieval citadel in Europe that is “lived in” and the old centre is one of the “must sees” on the Romanian map. But I have avoided the place for about 5 years for a number of reasons: I was seriously put-off after visiting a so-called “Medieval Festival” (a grotesque combination of kitsch and heavy metal); and it takes so long to get there by car from Bucharest (over 5 hours) and the train doesn’t exactly hurry. (more…)

An Actress to Watch Out For

This article was also published in Romanian on Hotnews.

Whenever a great Romanian actor dies someone tells me that this is the latest chapter in the decline of Romanian drama. Romanians can be very negative about their future and this negativity is projected onto the arts where they tend to see a glorious past and a miserable future. But I am not Romanian and I don’t share these views.

I am from Edinburgh, a city which hosts the world’s biggest theatre festival but is actually a deeply un-cultural place where alcohol and football are far more important than arts. (If you want to understand Scotland, read Irvine Welsh.) Like most of my compatriots I know little about acting and have no comment about the ancient Romanian actors whom people here hold so dearly. But whenever I go to a Romanian play or film, which is rarely as I am unable to resist the escapist attractions of Hollywood, I see great young actors. I recently saw Periphery and was mesmerized by the charisma of Ana Ularu. (more…)

Romanian Senate Relaxes Road Traffic Law

trafic-bucuresti The Chinese Ambassador to Bucharest once compared the building of motorways in his country to what’s been achieved in Romania. He said that both countries have been engaged on motorway building for about 20 years and while the Chinese have built over 40,000 kilometers of motorway during that time, Romania has barely managed 150 KM. He offered Chinese help in building a ring road for Bucharest, but his offer was ignored and Romania’s capital city remains in gridlock. (more…)

Swedes Sue Romanians Over the Name Ice Hotel

Getting to Romania’s Ice Hotel involves a hair-raising ride in a cable car to a frozen lake two thousand metres above sea level. Every December the family who run it cut blocks of ice from the frozen lake, bind them together with a mortar made of snow and water and build a small hotel that lasts until May. They also construct an ice chapel complete with a kitsch sculpture of the last supper and a frozen Jesus on the cross. (more…)

Adrian Severin hangs on Gaddafi style

Romanian MEP Adrian Severin is being hounded by the Bucharest press to resign from the European Parliament for his part in an 8-month long Sunday Times sting operation. Two undercover journalists from Britain’s biggest weekly broadsheet, masquerading as directors of a lobby company, approached over 60 Members of the European Parliament with offers of 100,000 Euro a year for proposing amendments in the European Parliament. (more…)

Ordo Quod Chaos

casa-poporului-crw_11298bw This article was also published in Romanian, on the Dilema Veche website.

My view of Romania over the last 10 years is that it has been developing in a steady, predictable and incremental manner. The key policies of capitalism which were put into place almost immediately after the 1989 revolution – free elections/press/travel, rule of law, property rights – have been steadily strengthened. Every few years there were rumours in the media that Iliescu, Nastase or Basescu are about to become dictators, but each of these has proven to be a chimera; each one of these leaders has done a bit to consolidate this stability. (more…)