Making Waves: The New Years That Never Came + Q&A

The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with actor Iulian Postelnicu

Last year’s top awarded Romanian film proved equally successful with local audiences, clearly eager to revisit the country’s recent, most resounding event. The New Year That Never Came is a symphonic project, leveraging a solid six-strand choral structure to map the fall of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. Set on the incendiary day of December 20, 1989, the film’s power lies in a calibrated mix of absorbing drama and crushing, often dark humor. Mureșanu ambitiously intertwines disparate lives, following—among others—the escalating paranoia of a factory worker after his son’s forbidden wish; the moral agony of an actress forced to laud the regime on TV for the never-broadcast New Year’s special; and the dangerous cat-and-mouse game between a student trying to flee and the ubiquitous Secret Police. It is a tightly woven narrative tapestry, building to a cinematic rupture that mirrors the emotional catharsis felt when history shattered the Communist lie.