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Sat 10 Oct 2009The last word on the 'golden age'
At the forefront of a new wave of Romanian film-makers who survived the Ceausescu regime, Cristian Mungiu is now ready to present the funny side of a grim era, he tells DONALD CLARKE
CRISTIAN MUNGIU doesn’t look much like the figurehead of a major cinematic movement. Round-faced, dressed in a neat sweatshirt and casual trousers, he comes across like a visiting postgraduate student or a particularly articulate secondary-school teacher. Jean-Luc Godard would have stormed into the room amid a cloud of poisonous Marxist vapours. Federico Fellini would have been delivered in a sedan chair by tattooed cherubs. Mungiu plonks himself down at the bar and begins chatting in staggeringly fluent English.
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