Director Emanuel Pârvu competes in the Official Section with a film about homophobia that is controversial in Romania

• ‘Three Kilometres to the End of the World’, by the flagship director of the Romanian New Wave of cinema, is the film chosen by Romania as a candidate for the Oscar.

Valladolid, 23 October 2024. After winning the 2018 award for Best Foreign Short Film at Meeting Point with his film Everything is Far Away, Romanian director Emanuel Pârvu has presented his new film, Three Kilometres to the End of the World, in the Official Section of the 69th Seminci, in which he tells the story of a boy who returns to his village to spend the summer with his family and suffers a homophobic attack. The film is Romania’s representative on the Oscar shortlist.

Emanuel Pârvu wanted to express in the film the reality of Romania today, and the problems he faced in releasing the film: ‘When we released the film in Romania a week ago, I received hate messages on social media; I was scolded saying that people didn’t want to see LGTBI films, because they were commissioned by the European government. It’s quite difficult to fight against that mentality’.

The portrayal of current social issues is one of the hallmarks of the so-called New Wave of Romanian cinema, which often deals with issues such as the country’s corruption and the problems faced by minorities: ‘This is something that has emerged in Romanian cinema in the last 20 years. If you go back 50 years, there were no such themes because during the communist era there were other latent issues. Why does the Romanian New Wave talk about corruption and minorities? Because they exist. We have to talk about the problems if we want them to disappear’.

The film is set in the Danube Delta region, a very conservative part of the country, where tourists of all kinds flock. ‘I think it is the only region in Romania where traditional society and the more modern personalities of Romania are forced to live together during the summer.

The director has also been involved as an actor in recent years in films by great contemporary Romanian directors, such as Cristian Mungiu, Adrian Sitaru, Contantin Popescu and Dan Chisu, and he acknowledged that this has had a huge influence on his role as a director: ‘It helped me a lot in my work as director and writer. When I write, I usually play all the characters, and that’s very useful.’ He added: ’If you are an actor you know how to treat actors. It’s very easy to humiliate someone if you tell them during filming that their acting is bad, so I try to be very careful about that.’

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