THE OAK

A savagely funny nightmare comedy set in the waning years of the Romanian police state, this anarchic film has its roots firmly planted in the dark and ironic soil of the blackest of political satire.

When her beloved communist father dies Nela leave Bucharest (with his ashes in a Nescafe jar!) for a job in another town. So begins her adventure into the hellholes of Romania before the fall of Ceaucescu's corrupt regime. She meets her subversive soulmate in the form of talented young doctor Mitica, whose independent spirit and irrespressible sense of humour endures, despite stifling tyranny, which ranges from the brutal to the banal. Only his lightning fast mind and much needed professional skills have kept him alive!

Pintilie lets his rebellious characters loose in a Kafkaesque spin of unbelievable incidents, and his offbeat love story - with the toughest of screen heroines - avoids the depressing tone of so many other eastern European films of its kind.

Walking a tightrope of frightening reality and laughable farce, this, his first feature in twenty years (after self-imposed exile in France from which he has returned to become the head of cinematography at the Ministry of culture in Romania) has a desperate energy that feeds on the comic absurdity and a spartan visual style. With its extremes of pleasure and pain The Oak weaves the most believable portraityet of the madness and anarchy of those last years of the Communist era.