Romanian director Emanuel Parvu’s third feature film, a tragedy set in a remote village in his country, shocked audiences at Cannes.
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Reading time: 4 min
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Presented in competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, Friday, the film Trois kilometers to the end of the world by Romanian director Emanuel Parvu shocked the audience, who gave the film and its team a standing ovation at the end of the screening. “THANKS”, said the director, surrounded by his actors, very moved.
This tragedy depicts the functioning of a retrograde and locked-down society, in which a young homosexual man finds himself locked up and martyred.
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The story takes place in the present day (it is good to specify this as time seems to have stopped in this village in the Danube Delta). Adrian, 17, a high school student in a neighboring town, returns to spend the summer with his family in this small village in “three kilometers from the end of the world”, seemingly peaceful. His father teases him about his relationship with the village girl who is promised to him, while his mother is busy in the kitchen, worried about the debts that the father is struggling to repay.
In the evening, Adrian goes out with his friend to the village nightclub. At the end of the evening, he accompanies a boy he met there. A few hours later, Adi comes home, his face swollen, his body covered in bruises. His father and mother accompany him to the police station to make a statement. So begins for the boy whose homosexuality is revealed during this beating, a nightmare that will have no end.
The director stages this microcosm in an almost theatrical form in which everyone plays their part. From the policeman to the priest, including the boy’s parents, and even more so the father of the attackers, a sort of “godfather” who makes rain and shine in the village, everyone agrees to cover up the affair. Here we continue to monitor each other, as in the time of Ceaușescu.
Interest, shame, fear, all have a good reason not to protect the adolescent. How did Adi get there? The harmful influence of the city, the vaccine against Covid 19? We must cure him of this illness, exorcise the evil. We recommend medication, prayers, a Bible under the pillow, we consider sending him to the monks… So after the first attack the young man must still endure the violence of his community and his loved ones. Only Llinca, the one promised to him, his friend, accepts him as he is and tries to help him.
In a simple but formidably effective staging, the film unfolds this tragedy with the relentless precision of a game of chess, the pieces advancing one after the other inexorably, until the noose is completely closed around the young boy, sequestered in this dead end at the end of the world, literally and figuratively.
“Metaphorically, for me this title symbolizes the reactions and the lack of understanding of the majority towards the minority, it’s like the end of the world or getting closer to it. The absence of discussion, the absence of love, lead to the end of the world.”
Emanuel Parvudirector
The shots are fixed, posed, skillfully framed, with a play on the off-camera and, more unusual in cinema, on the edge of the frame, which we see more often in photography, and which gives a very beautiful aesthetic to the film. The summer light, which splashes the magnificent landscapes imbued with peace in this region of Romania, contrasts with the smallness of the characters and the darkness of the story. A human tragedy in a little corner of paradise.
The film is served by a formidable team of actors, notably the two young actors who play Adi and Llinca, the only two characters who seem to have a little humanity in this nest of crabs entangled in the schemes and traditions of another age, obsessed with the judgment of neighbors, driven only by their particular interests.
With this moving film, the Romanian director depicts the worst of humanity, at its most banal, but also the best, through the very pure character of Llinca, and offers us a final breath in which the horizon finally opens and widens.
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Gender : Drama
Director: Emanuel Parvu
Actors: Bogdan Dumitrache, Ciprian Chiujdea, Laura Vasiliu
Country : Romania
Duration : 1h 45min
Exit : 2024
Distributer : Memento Distribution
Synopsis : Adi, 17, spends the summer in his native village nestled in the Danube Delta. One evening, he is violently attacked in the street. The next day, his world is completely turned upside down. His parents no longer look at him as they used to and the apparent tranquility of the village begins to crumble.