How I Celebrated the End of the World

Beautiful indeed. The beauty of this film is that it presents with high fidelity a era not so long ago in our life but so long ago in our memories. It's like you were closing your eyes and go back in those time. The atmosphere is recreated in the smallest details. Even the bottles of milk are the same they were 20 years ago. The director is not a judge, he just presents facts through eyes of different persons, as he recreates the every day life of people. this film is not a film of hate as we were used 17 years when we saw film about that times. It is a film to see with your heart open, with your soul free of any ideeas. It is a film of making peace with the past and with ourself. Take just little from your time and go see it.

It's an excellent movie but unfortunately it's hard to understand this movie unless u are Romanian and u lived in Romania during the communist era. I realize there were some scenes that were quite tricky for non-Romanians and the movie was full of symbols that were quite difficult to follow but for Romanian people were full of significance. The music is as well full of significance for people who grew up in the communist time. Maybe non-Romanian people will only see how Romanian during that communist era lived without power, out of running water and out of food but the film is a little bit more than that....maybe after seeing this movie u can get a little understanding about what does it mean to live in a communist country. Maybe the director is young and quite unexperienced but I think it's a really interesting movie to be seen and I definitely recommend it.

Indeed...the best Romanian film in a while. It took me back to those years when I was probably about Lalalilu's age and gave me a small piece of my childhood back, when on the one hand everything was a game, on the other it seemed 'normal' (to me) that a child has to suffer from cold and be ill every winter. I realized the tragedy of that only after the communist regime was gone. But what's more important, you don't have to know anything about those years in order to relate to this films, because IT relates to YOU. An honest film, lovely characters, great story and storytelling, totally unpretentious and charming. Great acting and cinematography, lovely directed. Definitely an A+ film from Romania so...expect more...;)

Not too strong on plot, "How I spent the end of the world" is strong on mood and feeling, and it very well compensates. I usually don't go crazy about "mood pieces" but this is definitely more. I caught the film at the up and coming Transylvania Film Festival (Tiff for short) where the film had its national premiere after a decent reception at Cannes only a few weeks earlier. The film is a MUST for any Romanian who has lived through the Ceausescu years as the filmmakers went through great pains to accurately depict the mood of those days from general landscape to the toy trucks, school uniforms and furniture all Romanians possessed and shared during an era of uniform mass-production. The film stands out as the harbinger of something historians will hopefully refer to as "the Romanian New Wave." With films like this, and "Marilena from P7" as well as Porumboiu's "Has it Been, Has it not Been" (another personal take on the shattering Revolution of 1989), Romanian cinema is finally entering the world circuit, and will hopefully stay there for a while.

I saw this film at the Toronto International Film Festival. This was an earnest but uneven film about life in Romania during the final months of Ceausescu's rule in 1989. Teenaged Eva and her young brother Lalalilu live with their parents and suffer the hardships of living under a hated dictator. Since their neighbour is a cop, they have to be careful what they say, and Eva's parents encourage her budding romance with the policeman's son Alex because of what the family connection could do for them. Instead, her rebellious attitude gets her expelled from her school and sent to a technical school for troubled students. There she connects with another neighbour, Andrei, whose family have already been punished for protesting against the regime. Together they make plans to escape Romania by swimming across the Danube, but when the crucial moment comes, Eva turns back.

Meanwhile, Lilu is plotting with his friends how to kill the dictator. Young Timotei Duma is very reminiscent of Salvatore Cascio, who played young Salvatore (Toto) in Cinema Paradiso. Which means he was extremely cute, and some of his scenes were the best in the film. There are two whimsical scenes where we seem to enter his childlike world: one is set in a submarine taxi where all the villagers can be taken to whatever city in Europe they wish to visit, and the other visualizes the boy blowing a huge chewing gum bubble that becomes so large that it floats away. Clearly, the theme of escape is on everyone's mind.

I wish there had been more scenes like that. Instead, most of the film consists of Eva's various meetings with Alex or Andrei and very little dialogue. For a main character, she was just a little too enigmatic. I definitely felt the film could have used a bit more dialogue and a bit more editing to speed the pace a bit. As well, the ending could have used a bit more explication. There are some pictures of Ceaucescu on live television and what appears to be live coverage of him fleeing but there is no explanation. For Romanians this might be self- evident but for the rest of the world, we could use a little bit of help.

The ending itself is quite lovely, with the increasing tension suddenly released with Ceaucescu's fall. And there were some moments of dark humour, as when the students are required to sing patriotic songs about how wonderful their lives are in Romania when it's plain that everyone is living in misery. But there is a bit of unexplained business at the end surrounding the policeman and his son Alex that bothered me. As well, there were a few strange cinematographic choices throughout the film that proved distracting. Scenes would be clumsily blocked by objects as if the director didn't quite know where to place his camera. It's not a huge surprise to discover that this is Catalin Mitulescu's first feature film.