“The New Year That Never Came”, interview with director Bogdan Mureşanu

At the 81 Venice Film Festival, Fred Film Radio interviewed Bogdan Mureşanu, director of “The New Year That Never Come” featured in Orizzonti. A film about the fall of Ceaușescu’s regime told through the lives of six characters.

A script full of humor

Even though “The New Year That Never Came” is about a truly dramatic moment in Romania’s history, the story is full of humor. Why this brilliant choice? “First of all, because it’s a two-hour and something long film. You can’t just play the same notes. You have to be careful about the micro-dosing, if you want, of humor, tragedy”, says director Bogdan Mureşanu. “Because I want it to be full of life, this is the film. I want it to be as life is. And most of the time, they are mixed. We are not living only in comedy or tragedy. This is something that is mixed. And I think that’s what I like about observing life. Secondly, because it might seem a difficult subject, I mean, the fall of a tyrant, with a happy ending, of course. So I was led by the happy ending to choose this path of dark humor”.

A story about ordinary characters in an extraordinary day

History in “The New Year That Never Came” is always present thanks to radio and television, but Bogdan Mureşanu focuses the narrative on six characters and their daily lives. “I want it to be very microscopic about this historical event. I think they are ordinary, most of them. They are ordinary characters on an extraordinary day. So I wanted to observe that. History is more like a background. It’s more like a canvas. There are echoes of these political situations. But actually, I wanted to observe normal people’s lives. I have six major main characters and six major narrative lines that allowed me to play a lot with the styles of storytelling. For instance, one of them, with the students, is more like a road movie. Because if you’re stuck into these interiors, you will suffocate the audience. So you feel the need to get out”.

The difficulty of telling the truth

One of the characters states that theater can awaken souls. Which souls should art awaken today? “That character is a bit of a hypocrite, to tell the truth. You should, all the time, take into account who’s telling what. So in that case it’s a theater director, who has a premiere in January. And he’s pushing an actress to go to this horrendous tv show praising Ceaușescu at the last minute. I think that we’re also hypocrites right now. European cinema is funded by States. Can you imagine how hard it is for an artist, actually, for a director to say the truth, and also to reapply for funding next year? It is pretty hard. So I admire those voices that can stand for freedom of speech, for their opinions. And they do that. So sometimes art can save us. The purpose is to tell the truth or to give birth to a polemic, to a debate”.

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