Released in 1992, three years after the fall of Ceausescu's regime in Romania, The Oak was the first film written and directed by the acclaimed director Lucian Pintilie upon his return home after many years of exile in France. Drawing on the brutal, absurd reality of a poverty-stricken Romanian society, the film depicts the story of Nela (Maia Morgenstern), a young schoolteacher pained by the recent death of her father, as she leaves home to take a low-paid job in a desolate small town outside Bucharest. Gang-raped by the locals and treated with contempt by the Communist authorities, she finds compassion and love in her relationship with Mitica (Razvan Vasilescu), a sardonic but good-hearted doctor at the local hospital. Deemed as the first world-wide smashing success of Romanian cinematography after 1989, the film uses both dark humor and gritty realism to ponder on the ethical dimensions of personal and collective values in the wake of the collapse of communism.
Review of The Oak
