At the beginning of each month, in the pages of “Weekend Adevărul”, you can read about some of the cultural milestones that you can tick off in your calendar – whether it’s a book, a film, a festival or a music album.
The Moromete family: Ilia and Niculae
FILM: At the time when time was also given to the collective
“In humans, everything starts from the head”, says Ilie Moromete. The communists also knew this and applied it diabolically and unscrupulously to the entire nation – the burned books, the censored words, the whispered words, the always looking over the shoulder, the ajar door are just some of the actions that almost irreversibly shaped the mentality of the Romanian society. Stere Gulea’s film renews the thread of the story and brings us Niculae Moromete to Romania suffocated by the Stalinist regime of the 1950s, where fear transformed destinies. The universe of the Moromete family acquires a different face, a different direction, a different identity – the very fact that there are fewer frames from Siliștea Gumești proves to us how the village of old is perishing with our eyes. Only Ilie’s house remains the same, only poorer and more desolate, sheltering a goat in the eaves and in the light of the opacity that time that had patience with people. It was 1954 and time wasn’t even ours anymore…
“Murmurs 3” shows us the beginning of a life that ended 35 years ago, but whose echoes can still be heard, at different intensities: the restriction of press freedom, high taxes for low incomes, censorship in the art world, abuses by state bodies , patriarchal values. Ending with the moment when Aurora Cornu, Marin Preda’s first wife, discovers the manuscript of the novel “Murmurs” and encourages the young writer to publish it, the film becomes a clear conclusion to the trilogy that followed the recipe for success for almost 40 years: the script and direction signed by Stere Gulea, and the impeccable aesthetic optics seen by the cinematographer Vivi Drăgan Vasile. In the role of Ilie Moromete, we see Horațiu Mălăele again, and the character of Niculae is played by Alex Călin.
The movie “Moromeții 3” premieres on November 22 and can be seen in cinemas all over the country.
BOOK: The struggle that remains after death
In February, the death of Vladimir Putin’s most vocal opponent came as sharply as the Siberian wind. After numerous arrests and an assassination attempt, the whole world understood that Aleksei Navalnyi would not escape from the prison where he had been sent, located in the frozen wasteland of the Ural Mountains. Eight months after his death, his family is publishing the volume of memoirs he had begun writing immediately after the moment in 2020 when the Putinists tried to poison him with a substance from the Novichok series of chemical weapons. It tells about him as a Soviet teenager (rebel) and about him as a young Russian. About what it means to be a great man in great history – and he is grateful to Gorbachev for cutting it from the roots. Or at least he tried, because he also notes: “Nostalgia for the Soviet era is an important feature of today’s Russia and a political factor that should not be underestimated. Long before Donald Trump’s patriotic promise to “make America great again”, Putin had uttered the slogan “We will be as respected and feared as the USSR”.
“Patriot” is a volume of memoirs from which we learn not only about the suffering and loneliness, longing for family and the fire of injustice experienced by Aleksei Navalnyi, but also about the red world that, dressed in the clothes of the past, tramples the present and democracy. “It’s really not painful to die”, so simply, tragically and reassuringly, Aleksei Navalnîi begins his book, the Romanian translation of which was published by Litera Publishing House.
EXPOSITION: Girl power!
The names of Romanian artists are so often missing from the museum plaques that society seems to have taken their absence from the artistic world as a concrete fact. Here, the new Art Safari edition does justice and, as much as the Dacia Palace, on Lipscani Street in Bucharest can accommodate, brings to the stage the women who have made an impressive contribution to Romanian art. The list opens with Queen Mary – and there is no better place to celebrate December 1st than by admiring the work and dedication of the one who shook hands with the politicians of the time and made the Great Union a reality. From Peleș to Balcic, from flowers to watercolors, from furniture to visual arts, Maria of Romania created and invested in Romanian culture. At Art Safari we learn that in 1916, under the patronage of the Queen and at the initiative of the artists Cecilia Cuţescu-Storck, Olga Greceanu and Nina Arbore, the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors was created.
Maria, before becoming the Queen of Romania. PHOTO: Art Safari
Also in this edition, we get to know Cecilia Cuţescu-Storck better, an artist with a strong influence in the cultural life of the interwar period and the first female art teacher in Europe. After you will learn the story of her life – she being one of the fierce voices of Romanian feminism in the 20th century – and you will admire her selection of paintings, we advise you to also visit the house where she lived with her husband – the building on Vasile Alecsandri street no. 16 is a gem whose interior walls are covered with Cecilia’s paintings and murals.
At Art Safari, neither the young artists, whose works are exhibited under the “Young Blood 3.0” hat, nor the artists from abroad, such as the German photographer Sibylle Bergemann, are forgotten. And for an unabashed acceptance of the importance of women, the organizers have also included a thematic and… impactful exhibition: representations of breasts in Romanian art. This edition of Art Safari is open until December 15.
MUSIC: Hope, suffocated in Pandora’s box?
The Division Bell, Pink Floyd’s 14th album and second without founding member Roger Waters, was released 30 years ago. The album carried the message that only communication can solve problems, but especially the imprint of the political and social events in Europe, since 1989. The song “A Great Day for Freedom” even talks about the Fall of the Berlin Wall and seems more current than ever: “On the day the wall came down/ They threw the locks onto the ground/ And with glasses high we raised a cry/ For freedom had arrived (…) Now frontiers shift like desert sands/ While nations wash their bloodied hands/ Of loyalty, of history, in shades of gray”.
BOOK: Chocolate (bitter)
After conquering the Romanian public with the novels “Three apples fell from the sky” and “Simon”, Narine Abgarian, one of the most beloved contemporary writers, returns with two books: “Life is more right than death” and “Grandfather of chocolate”, dedicated to young readers. For this new novel, the writer returns home, to the ordinary life of the small Armenian town of Berd. It describes in surprising detail the simple people of the place, their morning habits and traditions, their manners and speech, their houses and yards. Everything seems the same as before, but after the war, nothing is the same. For the Christmas story, Narine Abgarian takes us precisely to Bergen, where a grandfather in love with sweets and two little Poznans, Martin and Matilda, go through a lot of adventures, all with the desire to win a medal at the famous fair of sweets. The translations of both books are freshly printed by the Humanitas Junior Publishing House and can be found in bookstores, but also online (and only good ones to be put in the boxes by Moș Nicolae).
