Romania is a country of contradictions. The people are the kindest and warmest and most open that 
you’re likely to find. And yet there’s something holding them back. A Romanticism maybe, a guilty conscience possibly, a hard life definitely, not knowing the world, dreaming too much…
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Brăila has retained its happiness, innocence and lived beauty.
Everything functions the same as any other city or town. Children learn in schools, adults work/don’t work, old people remember; only you see a light inversed in the eyes of the taxi driver who was once an engineer.
Brăila I crush in my hands. It’s a desert near the water. With every step I am afraid the walls will crumble because of the ignorance and sourness and we will stand near the Danube looking at how the leftovers are sifting through our fingers.
However, I see a tall building in which friends and earthquakes await, another building, slightly older with large windows, in which children have come to learn from grandparents, a building of average height in which we sit with our hands behind our backs thinking we need to be the best and not understanding what it means, other buildings smaller in stature with rooms redder or darker, other faces with painful smiles and friendly screams while outside we play anything to extremes leaving it all to them.
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Romania, or how there are no orphans, Communists or Dracula in my home
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They had no light
And no food and no heat
And they had energy
What do we have?
What have we got?
And they have no health
And they have no money
And we are their hope
And we are their lives but
Yes they had lives
And God they did laugh
So what’s left?
What have they left for us?
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Did you know that Sibiu was the 2007 European Capital of Culture?
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The Most Beautiful Verse
The most beautiful verse is uncalled for,
Unnecessary, unexpected, as crazy
As blood from your nose.
It’s cheating nature, stealing
From the underside of a swan,
Whispering/screaming through
Jagged wooden cracks.
The most beautiful verse
Or
My wife, sleeping in the bed
Her grandfather built,
Looking as if
Cradled in her mother’s womb.
This poem is taken from my forthcoming book The Wooden Tongue Speaks– Romanians: Contradictions & Realities which will be published by Subculture Books.
Chivu Wary Of Romania's Euro Chances
Cristian Chivu spoke to Romanian daily Prosport over his country's prospects at Euro 2008, while also touching on his life with Internazionale...
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galleria zoom Chivu touched first of all on Romania's chances at Euro 2008, which he does not rate highly.
"I'm amazed when I hear things like 'We will win the Euros,'" he began.
"A miracle happens just once in life, and it took place when Greece won the title.
"We'll need to take our chances, but unfortunately we're 4th favourites to move up from the group.
"But we're preparing hard in friendlies. We'll work on tactics and teamplay. Our opponents don't count as much as these other things.
"We count on the class of Adrian Mutu. We can play without him, but we're not as good.
"Radu Stefan? I can't wait to see a Lazio-Roma derby, with Stefan and Adrian Pit playing."
Chivu, of course, had a successful spell at the Giallorosso half of Rome, but now plies his trade with Inter.
"I feel great in Milan," he said.
"After all, I didn't move country, just city. I'm still in touch with old AS Roma teammates, but now my career is with Inter in Milan.
"I wanted to stay in the heart of the city. At first I used to get lost, but now navigation is easy. Still, it's a 40 minute drive to the training centre at Appiano Gentile."
Richard Gavrilescu, Goal.com
19.02.08 In my words: Realistically speaking, Romania have no chance. Heavily reliant on Mutu and Chivu, they can only dream that France, Italy and Holland will all have bad days at the office and won’t perform. What annoys me is the Romanian mentality of throwing in the towel way before anything happens. There is no reason to think that other teams are greater than you and are preordained to beat you. What you need is an ultra-positive mindset, starting from the head-coaches and working its way down, so that motivation levels are high and what you also need is a clear idea of strategy and tactics. Romanian teams, such as Steaua and Dinamo, play a very naïve and old fashioned style of football. Good teams no longer risk passing balls back to the defence and they look to create openings by quick one-touch passing. In my opinion, players like Chivu and Mutu should help run the national team and teach others good practice and tactics that will work against high-class opposition. It’s simply not good enough to say that Romania are 4th favourites.
On the other hand, the Romanian under 21 team is doing very well at the moment and there are up and coming youngsters bought and sold on the market. Two players look good for the future and I look forward to them maturing and doing great things: Bogdan Stancu (currently playing for Unirea Urziceni) and Dumitru Copil (currently playing for the Hearts youth team).
Fan Rant: Why the Foreign Film Oscar Category Doesn't Really Matter This Year
Posted Feb 18th 2008 11:02AM by Kim Voynar
Filed under: Awards, Politics, Oscar Watch
There's almost always some controversy around the Best Foreign category at the Oscars. This or that film doesn't make it in because of some minutae of the rules, and critics (and sometimes, directors and producers) howl in protest. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the category this year, though, it was a bit different. The loudest howls of protest were not over the films excluded for various obscure rules, but over the exclusion of Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu's Cannes winner, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (aka, "that Romanian abortion film." )
The Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips wrote on his Talking Pictures blog recently (originally posted February 5, and rerun today) about the film's exclusion. Phillips writes that the film was third on his own Top Ten list for the year, saying, "It is a rare film indeed that shows you so much in the way of dire circumstances, yet does not exploit or cheapen the human factor." Phillips talked to Mungiu about the film for this post, and the director has some rather astute things to say about some specific decisions he made with regard to the filmmaking.
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days was not on my own Top Ten list this year, and I've had numerous heated arguments friendly discussions with my colleague James Rocchi, who loved the film, about why I didn't personally care for it. One the one hand, I was not among those of my colleagues at Telluride who left a screening there puzzling over why this particular film had won at Cannes; on the other, I just didn't personally care for the film, much as I recognized the absolute artistry of its filmmaking. Mostly, I just really loathed the protagonist of the film. She was so weak, whiny and annoying, she made so many bad decisions and expected others to clean up after her, and I just found it hard to suspend my disbelief that her friend (or anyone else for that matter) would go to such extreme lengths to help her procure a late abortion.
Nonetheless, my personal annoyance with the main character aside, it really is quite a brilliant piece of filmmaking, and I was shocked that it didn't end up on the list of Oscar nominees. If you look at the five films that the great minds at the Academy decided deserved to be among the nominees this year -- Beaufort, The Counterfeiters, Mongol, Katyn, and 12 -- it's just shocking that 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days was excluded. Almost without exception, the critics and film journalists I know were dismayed that the film didn't make the cut.
This is not to say that the five films on the list aren't good -- of them, I've only seen The Counterfeiters -- and I see quite a lot of foreign films each year -- but that doesn't mean the others aren't perfectly good films. The other nominees sound like decent enough films, but the omission of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days sticks out like a sore thumb. The film won at Cannes, it was on countless critics' top ten lists, raved about far and wide, and a lot of my colleagues were convinced even at Telluride that it was a lock for Best Foreign. For it not to even receive a nomination was just bizarre.
I suppose you can argue that the subject matter was just too heavy for the Oscar blue-hairs; abortion doesn't seem to go over too well with them -- Lake of Fire, the really excellent abortion doc, also failed to make the final cut in its category. But of all the foreign films on the circuit this year, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days was by far the most talked about, the most buzzed about, the one most people expected to win. Without it in the running, this category just feels largely irrelevant this year.
18.02.08 In my words: It really does not matter that 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was not nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar. In a way, it doesn’t matter that it won the Palme d ’Or. What matters is how the media dealt with the film. Before winning the Palme d ’Or there was hardly any intelligent media analysis on the film, and I have yet to read anything interest post-Cannes. It was the Romanian abortion film, the grim reality drama, the continuation of the Romanian film renaissance. How the media and the general public seems to deal with the film is by using clichés. Why not make more of an effort and compare the film with another abortion film, like, for example, Vera Drake? What do the films tell you about their respective societies?
Even now, when I search for reviews or articles about 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days I’m horrified to come across so much ignorance. Because to really appreciate the film you need to have read up a bit on what was going in Romania in the 80s, you need to at least be able to distinguish between Bucharest and Budapest, you just need some knowledge basically and knowledge should be a priority and a necessity for a journalist or reviewer. You can’t simply walk into 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days having watched blockbusters or Truffaut films all your life and expect it to click into your analytical vision. The point of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is how two ordinary girls deal with a situation that would, in another society, be dealt with professionally. The man who performs the abortion symbolises the patriarchal nature of the Romanian society in the 80s as he treats the women objectively and without emotion. The doctors in the apartment show the blatant hierarchy in a society that was meant to be equal. These points are an example of how 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days can be properly dissected and analysed. It wasn’t simply that Romanian abortion film and to call it that is to deal an enormous slap across the face to the director and to everybody who worked on the film.
And, as I say, I don’t worry about Oscars having kept a good lookout on how the media overlooked 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days before it won the Palme d ’Or. The Guardian, for example, ran several blogs and opinionated pieces on Cannes, with extended write-ups about Blueberry Nights, Zodiac and No Country for Old Men and then, usually at the very bottom, two lines on the horrific Romanian small budget abortion film. It was realist they said! Wow, that’s really something new isn’t it? Once the awards were handed out the media and his wife were all dying to interview Mungiu on his incredible underdog’s film and the New Wave Romanian cinema. Hypocrisy at its laziest that’s what I say.
Brăila a rămas mai ales bucuria, inocenţa şi frumuseţea trăită.
