TIFF Q&A: Cristian Mungiu, Palme d'Or winning director

When his film "4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days" won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Cristian Mungiu went from being a relatively unknown Romanian filmmaker to a major name on the international arthouse film scene.

Set in 1987, the film follows closely along as one woman frantically tries to help her friend procure an illegal abortion. Made up mostly of very long single takes, the film is an exceptional achievement of conception, acting and execution, with an emotional acuity and perceptiveness that reel the viewer in.

Next week Mungiu will on his own undertake a commercial distribution of "4 Months" in Romania. He is releasing the film there on eight prints, which for a country that he says has only 35 cinemas is on par with a Hollywood blockbuster release.

Having chatted with Mungiu briefly at a dinner party thrown by his American distributor, IFC First Take, I sat down with him for a slightly longer talk a day or two later about what it is like to suddenly be a star of the festival circuit.

Can you tell me what your expectations were going into Cannes? You mentioned to me the other night that you heard so much buzz during the week you ultimately weren't entirely surprised by winning the Palme d'Or.

It's very difficult to remember when you started to have hopes.... Obviously at the beginning we never expected something like this might happen. For a long while I only wanted to be accepted into the competition. So the great news for us was just that, it was a good start and anything else would be a bonus. But throughout the week little things started to build up, and by the end of the festival the buzz was so big that we started to believe we might get the Palme d'Or. And honestly we would have been disappointed not to get it by then.

What do you think it is in the film that people respond to so strongly?

I can only speculate, I don't know. I think that there's a sense of directness in the film, and today it is not politically correct to say the truth, bluntly, the way you remember it. But this is something I wanted to have in the film, this my story, the way I remember it and I'm going to tell it to you the way I've seen and experienced it, with all the details and without leaving anything aside. There's a sense of honesty to this kind of storytelling. The feeling is I'm not going to trick you in any way. This is not a spectacular story, I will not use music to make you cry, I'm not even cutting, I'm not even going to do a close-up. It's about what I can do with these actors in front of you. And so people feel the emotions of the actors, a connection with the characters they may not get from a conventional-type film.

The film ends with one of the characters looking directly at the camera, in a sense throwing the audience's attentions back out from the screen. Why did you choose to end the film in this way?

I'm not going to explain in words what happens in the film. If I could explain in words I would write it down as something else. I just thought that it would give you a sense that eventually it is this girl in the film who is going to understand something from what happened, and this is hopefully trying to pass to you the idea that I was not making any moral judgments about this, but you should think about this. I don't want to say this is literally what should be understood, it's a complex image, but hopefully it has some of this.  -- Mark Olsen

Photo: Actress Jane Fonda presents Mungiu with the Palme d'Or prize at the 60th International Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or Award Ceremony on May 27 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)