Lucian's Blog

Cristian Nemescu was a rising star. Known especially through his last two short-movies, one winning a prize in Transylvania Film Festival last year, he was expected with very much interest to accomplish his debut in long production. However, his first movie is a postume one.

Cristian Nemescu was killed last summer in a car accident in Bucharest. It was a black year for Romanian cultural life, the same fate being shared by rockstar Teo Peter.

Cristian Nemescu was a talented young cinematographer, with a great skill in showing the tragical-comic side of everyday life. His first and last film is named "California dreamin'" and it is speaking about yet another Romanian trauma during communism. In the first years after the second World War, Romanians believed they are to be liberated from the Soviet Red Army by a great air attack comming from US. Almost 10 years partisans in the mountains and the entire society expected what they called "an imminent attack". This was never to come. The rest is history: communism was fortifyed with the help of the secret political police, partisans were captured or killed, dictatorship became ruthless.

Nemescu shows us a piece of an imagined history. In a province small village, we have a railway station, with a director still waiting for the americans. He refuses to give the green light for a NATO train heading for Kosovo. The train is supposed to pass through the station and continue south. But the director is comitted to make the Americans stay in the village, thus ending his waiting.

It's all about Romanians wanting to be free. It's about the dispair 50 years of communism and 17 years of endless transition had produced in the souls of the simplest people. After almost 70 years of waiting, finally somebody has the power of making the Americans stay.

The great care for details, the great play of actors comming from very complex and different cultures (Razvan Vasilescu plays the railway station director, while Armand Assante is the US Army captain, Ion Sapdaru, known from "13:05 East of Bucharest", winner of the great prize in TIFF 2006) and the perfect absurdity of the script are proofs that Cristian Nemescu mastered the art of story-telling and the visual approach to reality.

The new, numerous generation of Romanian directors has lost one of its captains. But in the battle for the survival of Romanian cinematography, nobody's lost; everyone becomes sooner or later a soldier of the open skies.

Lucian Dragos