R.M.N.

A few days before Christmas, Matthias (Marin Grigore) returns from Germany to his village in Transylvania, having knocked out a supervisor there who racially insulted him. At home wait his estranged wife Ana, his son Rudi, plagued by fears, his elderly father Otto – and Csilla (Judith State), his former lover, who runs the village’s small bread factory. Because no local will work for the wages on offer, the factory hires three workers from Sri Lanka. That is enough: in the multi-ethnic village, fears erupt that no one thought possible any more. “R.M.N.” by Cristian Mungiu (Romania, 2022) observes how unease turns into hatred.

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu directs with cold precision: the title refers to magnetic resonance imaging, and the film is, in Mungiu’s words, a brain scan searching for what lies beneath the surface. Its core is a village meeting in the community hall, a good quarter of an hour in a single take, in which the inhabitants demand the expulsion of the outsiders while in the same breath recounting their own years as labour migrants. It was based on a real incident in the village of Ditrău in 2020. It premiered in the Cannes 2022 competition. “R.M.N.” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2022.

Shown at the 2022 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2022 · Film Archive