Clody Bertola

This film envisions the patriotic and tragic life of Romanian composer Ciprian Porumbescu.

Young Felix moves into his eccentric uncle’s house and is immediately drawn to the enigmatic Otilia, a free-spirited woman who lives by her own rules. Love, inheritance games, decaying mansions, and fragile hearts collide in this elegant adaptation of George Călinescu’s novel Enigma Otiliei.

Two peasants from Transylvania go to America in order to meet their brother who had left Romania ten years earlier. They meet a prophet in the American state of Utah and eventually help the cause of justice in the villages where the prophet proves to be a dictator and exploiter of the coal miners over there.

Around the nationalization in 1948, a worker's daughter, as a student, is attracted by the social life offered by a breed horse owner. The relationship will sour by the cruelty with which he kills the horses, rather then give them away.

The title translates as Fools of Bărăgan, in reference to a band of beleaguered feudal Rumanian peasants. But these are no fools: instead, they are fearless freedom fighters, organizing a brave (though foredoomed) revolt against the tyranny of the landowners. The parallels drawn between the people of Bărăgan and Russia's revolutionary leaders are all but impossible to miss. It would have been nice, however, if the story had not been told in such a heavy-handed, spell-it-all-out fashion.