An image-perfect wedding ceremony goes horribly awry when the groom’s mistress crashes the festivities, sending the bride-to-be right into a tailspin — and towards her final redemption — in “3 Days in September,” the newest from veteran Romanian director and producer Tudor Giurgiu (“Freedom”).
The movie, which opens the twenty fifth Transilvania Intl. Movie Pageant, stars Andreea Vasile as Bianca, a 40-year-old bride whose betrothal to Victor (Emilian Oprea) is upended by revelations that he’s been sleeping together with his co-worker. With not solely her wedding ceremony however her plans for the longer term now in query, Bianca flees the scene — and is rapidly swept up in a rollicking, night-of-the-soul odyssey round a pale resort city.
Marked by caustic humor and biting comedy — and constructed round an audacious, 65-minute single take — “3 Days in September” is a departure for Giurgiu, who can also be the TIFF founder and president.
His final movie, the docudrama “The Spruce Forest,” launched final yr, was based mostly on the 1941 bloodbath of as much as 200 civilians by Soviet border troops as they tried to cross into Romania. His earlier work of fiction, “Freedom” (2023), is a tense dramatic thriller set throughout Romania’s 1989 revolution that follows armed clashes after an assault on a police station. (Within the interim between the 2 productions, he made the documentary “Nasty,” a freewheeling portrait of the ’70s Romanian tennis dangerous boy Ilie Năstase, which premiered on the Cannes Movie Pageant in 2024.)
Following such weighty subject material, Giurgiu was, by his personal admission, prepared for a change of tempo, though he says he was “strongly motivated” to maneuver in a distinct route after listening to from his hardest critic: his eldest son.
“‘We all know you’re just into communism and history,’” the director recollects the 19-year-old telling him. “‘Gen Z wants different stuff. Give us something else.’”
What that “something” is perhaps, nevertheless, proved elusive. For a while, Giurgiu had been toying with the thought of a movie a few disastrous wedding ceremony “where everything collapses and goes wrong.” He was impressed, too, by his compatriot Radu Jude, a prolific provocateur who restlessly experiments with themes and codecs — his latest function, “Kontinental ’25,” was shot totally on an iPhone — working at a breakneck tempo, typically with budgets that might make the common arthouse filmmaker balk.
“You can really have fun doing those films in a shorter time, and then you move to another project,” says Giurgiu. “And then I thought, ‘Why not? Let’s do something with this spirit in mind.’”
Across the identical time, a buddy known as Giurgiu with a proposal to make his subsequent movie at a resort the buddy had just lately opened within the Black Sea resort city of Eforie Sud. Giurgiu not solely jumped on the thought of capturing there however noticed it “as an occasion to work with new people,” proposing a collaboration the place the important thing creatives — from the director and DoP to the manufacturing and costume designers — had by no means labored collectively earlier than. Thus, the Arome Movie Inventive Camp was born.
Director, producer and Transilvania Film Festival founder Tudor Giurgiu
Courtesy Transilvania Movie Pageant
The manufacturing would have a good timeline, capturing over the course of a frenetic week final September. There was just one drawback. “We had a concept, but we didn’t have a story,” Giurgiu says.
It was Transilvania Movie Pageant inventive director Mihai Chirilov who he credit with “finding the right canvas, the right story structure” for “3 Days in September.” Stressing the impossibility of filming and modifying a whole function over the course of 1 week, he proposed a film constructed round a single-take centerpiece, a selection that was impressed by Chilean filmmaker Matías Bize’s 2003 drama “Saturday.”
After receiving Bize’s blessing, Giurgiu and his collaborators set to work, drafting the script in a single month and making common journeys to Eforie Sud to map out Bianca’s journey across the seaside city. The prolonged scene that makes up the majority of the movie, says Giurgiu, required “a lot of choreography” from solid and crew alike. “Beside your craft, beside the work with the DoP, we had to do a lot of preparation with the actors,” he says. “We didn’t improvise. Everything had to be like clockwork.”
That included the efficiency of lead actress Vasile, who can also be the director’s spouse — a indisputable fact that Giurgiu says helped the duo discover its means by means of the demanding, single-take scene.
“The acting had to be very precise,” he says. “We talked a lot, and she was so stressed. But without her carrying the tension, the emotion throughout the 65-minute single take — without those things, it would have just been like a technical achievement. It has to have a meaning, and this kind of emotion has to be conveyed by the actors.”
“3 Days in September” arrives in Cluj following its world premiere on the Intl. Movie Pageant Rotterdam. It was written by Giurgiu, Conrad Mericoffer and Radu Grigore and produced by Giurgiu and Mirel Olaru for Level Movie. Cinematography was achieved by first-time DoP Alexandru Dorobanțu, with the solid alongside stars Vasile and Oprea rounded out by Conrad Mericoffer, Adela Popescu and Mirela Zeța.
Up subsequent for Giurgiu is a documentary about legendary Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci, which can reunite him with the artistic staff behind “Nasty.” Additionally within the works is a interval piece in regards to the unknown lifetime of a person he describes as “the Romanian Nijinsky,” Dumitru “Trixy” Checais, who was the main determine in Romania’s ballet scene within the Nineteen Forties however was later imprisoned by communist authorities.
Giurgiu says the movie will inform the story of the dancer’s life whereas “also mirroring the destiny of this country,” including: “It’s mostly a story about identity, with the backdrop of a very complicated period in the history of Romania.”
The Transilvania Intl. Movie Pageant runs June 12 – 21.
