The Oak

Director: Lucian Pintillie

1992 / 105min / DCP

The first film made by the late Pintilie in his native Romania after a two-decade-long Parisian exile, The Oak is regarded as one of the key works in the country’s post-communist cinema, a fierce, full-throttle road movie/apocalyptic farce in which schoolteacher Maia Morgenstern flees smothering Bucharest to journey through the bleak hellscape of Ceaușescu-era Romania. “A movie of imaginative hysteria that rattles with sustained fury… As breathless as a fiddle break in a Romanian doina, The Oak swirls around before ending with the greatest atrocity of all.”—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Part of Visionary Auteurs: Five Decades of mk2