Crai nou

In the midst of the chaos she awakens, a twenty-something woman named Irina. All she is longing for is another moment to close her eyes again, to escape the constant battles and bouts of violence, the resentments and reproaches of the members of her extended family who run a holiday resort in mountainous Rumania.
All the characters in CRAI NOU are trapped in archaic patriarchal family structures, a terrarium of anger and anxiousness, blessed by the church and enforced by desperately plotting uncles and analphabetic cousins who need Irina for her writing and numeracy skills, but will never recognize her, let alone allow her to go and study in Bucharest or lead an independent life. So it is Irina who suffers most, struggles most, and tests the elastic snap of the ties that bind her to its despairing extremes.
Winner of the Golden Shell at this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival, Alina Grigori’s feature debut is full of sound and fury; the camera dazzles and spins, the sound design taps and hammers. It tells a history of post-communist trauma and (sexual) violence in a much more accelerated way than we have seen in Rumanian cinema so far. And building on that tradition with all the ways in which power is portrayed and performed, it gives us a desperate example of impotence and incapacity. (Dana Linssen)

Alina Grigore: DOMINO (2016, K), TRIPTIC (2016, K), RIVER-BET (2017, K)