19/11/2014 - The updated adaptation of Ioan Slavici’s novella will start shooting this autumn

Marian Crişan is ready to start shooting his latest feature, Orizont [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Marian Crisan
film profile], a drama inspired by one of the most famous novellas in Romanian literature, Ioan Slavici’s The Mill of Good Luck. The novella was adapted in 1955 by Victor Iliu in the Cannes-selected film of the same name. 

Crişan’s screenplay updates the plot for the present day, now that illegal logging has become one of Romania’s most pressing environmental issues: a family moves into a chalet in the Apuseni Mountains and opens it to tourists, but the main characters will soon get caught up in the conflict between the lawmen and the illegal logging mafia. The main actors are András Hatházi, with whom Crişan worked for his Locarno-awarded Morgen [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2010); Rodica Lazăr; and Bogdan Zsolt. Shooting will take place this autumn and winter in the environs of the Apuseni Mountains, with Oleg Mutu serving as DoP.

The film has a budget of approximately €800,000. Solar IndieJunction, Mandragora Movies and Rova Film will produce, with Bobby Păunescu, Viorel Sergovici, Mihai Dorobanţu and Marian Crişan as producers. In 2012, the project received a grant of circa €140,000 from the Romanian National Film Center. 

“I have always been attracted to the novella,” Crişan told Cineuropa, adding that he read it again a few years ago and decided to update the plot for the present day. “I think the family topic, the ‘peacefulness of the hut’, as Slavici puts it, will always be contemporary. I am most interested in what we do in order to make this so-called peacefulness last. How we hide the past and the secrets in a family,” said the director, remarking that the events in his film take place in “a world lost in a mountain landscape”.

The movie is expected to end post-production next spring, with a domestic release possible in the second half of 2015.