HOOKED

Mihai and his girlfriend, whom he calls “Sweetie”, drive out of Bucharest into the countryside one weekend. A picnic is meant to do the relationship good, worn down as it is by bickering – though there are moments in between when the two of them laugh and hold hands. Then, on a forest road, the car runs over a young woman, a prostitute. Mihai wants to take her to hospital; Sweetie is against it and gets her way. What follows casts a new light on the couple – and shows how much people can change in a single day. “Hooked” (Pescuit sportiv, Romania 2008) is the first feature by Adrian Sitaru.

Sitaru tells the story entirely in subjective shots: the camera takes on the characters’ point of view, the viewer sees what they see, and finds themselves in the middle of a relationship that is falling apart before their eyes. The film premiered in 2008 in the Giornate degli Autori in Venice; it established Sitaru as one of the important new voices of Romanian cinema after 1989. “Hooked” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2009.