Synopsis: When Claudiu Crulic, a young Romanian in Poland, was arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, he became a pawn in a Kafkaesque miscarriage of justice and went on a hunger strike to protest his treatment in jail. Anca Damian’s documentary is by turns chilling and heartbreaking — Crulic himself “narrates” the film posthumously, his words voiced by Vlad Ivanov, star of such Romanian New Wave titles as Police, Adjective and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days—but also ironic, with a bit of black humor thrown in. What makes this extraordinary documentary even more compelling is its strong visual style: Damian uses handdrawn, cutout, and collage animation techniques to create a strikingly memorable film. [Synopsis courtesy of New Directors/New Films]
If there’s one thing that New Directors/New Films had trouble doing this year, it was generating a consensus. Out of the films that screened as part of this year’s festival, 12 received both A's and F's from critics who attended screenings at the MoMA/Film Society of Lincoln Center series, which con...
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