Graduation

GRADUATION is award-winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu's (4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS; BEYOND THE HILLS) gripping, incisive drama of Romanian mores and morals, with implications that resonate far beyond national boundaries. The film premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where Mungiu was awarded Best Director, and also screened at the 2016 Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals and AFI Fest 2016.

Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) is a physician living in a small mountain town in Transylvania who has raised his daughter Eliza (Maria-Victoria Dragus) with the promise that once she turns 18, she will leave Romania to study and live abroad. And his plan is close to succeeding – Eliza has won a scholarship to study psychology in the UK, and just has to pass her final exams, which is a formality for such a good student. On the day before her first written exam, however, Eliza is victim to an attack that could jeopardize her entire future. Now Romeo must make a decision; there are ways of resolving the problem, but all of them deeply compromise the principles that he, as a father, has taught his daughter. In order to secure her future, he may find himself becoming what he hates most – someone who tries to game a corrupt system.

“If there’s a false note in ‘Graduation,’ I didn’t notice it – I found only truth and humanity in the tale of a decent man who loses his moral compass.” – Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal

“An excoriating, gripping, intricately plotted morality play, Mungiu’s film is less linear, more circular or spiral-shaped than his previous Cannes titles, but it is no less rigorous and possibly even more eviscerating and critical of Romanian society. “Graduation” is intimate, epic and crisply intelligent.” – Jessica Kiang, ThePlaylist.net

"Understated but profound...Might be (Mungiu's) best work yet. It might be the saddest, most suspenseful film I’ve ever seen about educational bureaucracy." – Bilge Ebiri, The Village Voice

“Graduation is a masterly, complex movie of psychological subtlety and moral weight, about the shabby choices people make as they claw their way up.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian