23/09/2011

Closer to the Moon, the second foreign-language film by Nae Caranfil (pictured) is currently shooting in Bucharest. The production, which stars Vera Farmiga and Mark Strong, has an estimated budget of $7m.

Inspired by real events, the film explores the background of one of the most notorious bank robberies in the history of Europe. In 1959, five man and one woman, all with important connections in the Communist Party and members of the Jewish community of Bucharest, robbed the Romanian National Bank. The six stole the equivalent of approximately $2 million of today's money - after two months of investigations, the authorities arrested them and forced them to star in a propaganda film about their crime - immediately afterwards, the five men were executed and the woman sentenced to life imprisonment. She was released in 1964 and allowed to emmigrate in Israel where she died in 1977.

The events have already inspired a documentary film, Alexandru Solomon's The Great Communist Robbery, which gave Nae Caranfil the idea for his feature, initially called Alice in Tara Tovarasilor [Alice in Comradeland]. In 2007, the director's screenplay won a grant ofapproximately €600,000 from the National Film Center, but the big budget required for the recreation of a long-gone Bucharest made the project remain in development hell until 2011.

The film's international title is inspired by the demands of one of the protagonists, who asked authorities to send in him into space instead of being executed, the director told Romanian film website Cinemagia.

Vera Farmiga, known for Martin Scorsese's The Departed and Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, plays Alice, the only woman and the only survivor of the events, while Mark Strong is Max Rosenthal, a former head of a criminal investigation unit in Bucharest police force who helps organize the robbery. The international cast is rounded up by Harry Lloyd, Christian McKay and Allan Corduner. The film's DoP is Marius Panduru.

Closer to the Moon is produced by Romania's Mandragora MoviesDenis Friedman Productions (France) and Agresywna Banda (Poland).

One of the most loved Romanian directors, Nae Caranfil, debuted with Sundays on Leave, in 1993. In 2002 he released Philanthropy, the second-most successful domestic release of the past decade, with 112,000 admissions. His most recent work is The Rest is Silence [+see also:
trailer
film profile] in 2007.