In WWI a group of Romanian soldiers from Transylvania desert the german army and consitute a resistance commando group.
A young engineer which settled in Bucharest after his studies, returns to his village to spend his sick leave. He takes on a project to moderniza an old mill.
Andrei is now a truck driver, but in one of his travels to Germany, he must become once again a boxer just for one night at the middleweight category.
A medic is hunted by guilt of killing a man in a car accident, a cop who staged an experiment of placing a dummy on the side of the road and a dead man found found on the side of the road.
Based on a theatrical text by Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), who was a bitter and funny witness of the turn-of-the-20th-century Romanian bourgeois mores, Carnival Scenes manages to preserve and further enhance the slightly hysteric atmosphere of his plays. Pintilie creates a strange combination of carnival scenes which is brought to the screen as a burlesque, fast-paced, screwball comedy with a meditative undertone. This film was banned in Romania for a decade until the death of Ceausescu in 1989 and was only released after the 1989 revolution.
Securitate Officer Foma
In 1950 a Western spy is clandestinely parachuted into Communist Romania to retrieve secret WW2 codes and agent lists and also to assist a group of anti-Communist guerrillas escape but the Communist police is setting a trap.
During the summer of 1944, while Romanians turn weapons against Nazis, Mihai, an orphan teenager whose parents died in a bombing, tries to enlist in order to fight in the front line but he discovers that former police commissioner Potra tortured and beaten prisoners, including his father, who was political detained. Mihai will fight to bring Potra in front of the justice.
A police officer is investigating the disappearance of a colleague's young boy. His key seems to be the "dark skinned" friend of the boy about whom nobody cares, including the police.
A director of a shipyard abusively fires a foreman who has opposing ideas.
Luca
A young man is taking hard his parents divorce and constant absence, so he decides to work on a hydro dam project. Here he finds some relatives that serve as a family.
Young engineer Doru is called to the Prosecutor's Office and questioned on his wife's unlawful ways of making money. Soon he'll learn about her true character and he'll regret having broken up with Livia, a woman who truly loved him.
Breban
September, 1944. A group of soldiers and resistance fighters set to blow up a viaduct of strategic value.
Hodoș
After the Nazi troops retreat from Czechoslovakia, some troops are left behind and choose to fight to death holding a castle instead of surrendering to the soviets.
Prunache
A police major is investigating a gangster.
A terminally ill professor gets an immoral offer.
officer
Romania, 1944. Six intelligence agents, Russians and Romanians, at the cost of their own lives, prevented the Nazis from destroying a strategically important object — a tunnel on the path of the Soviet Army.
Pavel has to confron his father in law, who is decided to compromise him in front of the village.
Vying for Principality of Moldavia's throne the descendants of Prince Stephen the Great start a bloody civil war in 1612.
Vulpașin is desperatley in love with Nastasia, but she is partial to Luca, which works at a factory outside the slum they live in ("accros the lifting gate").
An ex-convict struggles to survive by brute force alone in a turn-of-the-century slum in Bucharest. Codine is the thug who served 10 years for murdering a friend. He returns home to his miserly mother, whose penny-pinching ways infuriate her son. A young boy looks up to Codine, and through the man's eyes he sees the economic and social injustices from an adult perspective. When Codine kills another man who violated his trust, his mother becomes more unhinged and paranoid. Thinking her son will steal her hoarded money, she plots to kill her only son. The impressionable child watches in horror and amazement at the cruel machinations of the adult work that surrounds him.
An aspiring astronaut prepares his ship for take-off, plugs in a razor and causes a blackout. In the deep darkness the boy imagines himself meeting the literary characters who have enthralled readers past with their stories of space travel.
