New Year That Never Came
Thursday 23. 1. 2025.
16:00 – The Damned Yard Theatre
It is 20th December, 1989, and Ceaușescu’s regime is on its last legs. The army violently suppresses an uprising in Timisoara, but news that reaches Bucharest is scant and sanitized. Six people find themselves in the eye of the storm without necessarily realizing it. A TV director has to find a solution for his New Year’s show as the key actress has defected. He will find it in a theater actress who is in distress as she can’t reach her ex-boyfriend in Timisoara. His son, a student, is planning to flee to Yugoslavia by swimming across the Danube. The son is being watched by the officer of the Securitate secret police, who is struggling to move his mother from her old house scheduled for demolition to a new apartment that she cannot stand. The move is being executed by a factory worker, who is in panic after his son writes a letter to Santa Claus, saying that his father wants Ceausescu dead. All these lives, under constant and invisible surveillance by the Securitate, converge in a tragicomedy that climaxes with the bang of a firecracker in the most unlikely hands, kicking off the Revolution.
Director: Bogdan Mureșanu
Screenplay: Bogdan Mureșanu
Directors of Photography: Boróka Biró, Tudor Platon
Film Editing: Vanja Kovačević, Mircea Lacatuș
Producers: Bogdan Mureșanu, Vanja Kovačević
Cast: Adrian Vancica, Nicoleta Hancu, Iulian Postelnicu, Mihai Calin, Emilia Dobrin, Andrei Miercure
Duration: 138’
Romania, 2024
About Director

Bogdan Mureșanu
Born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1974, Bogdan is a writer, director and producer. His work includes animated films, documentaries, fiction films and TV series. He directed the short films Half Shaved (2012), Negruzzi 14 (2016), Spid (2016) and The Christmas Gift (2018), which won awards at festivals including Montreal, Clermont-Ferrand, Kustendorf. The New Year That Never Came, his first feature film, received the award for the best film in Orizzonti program at the Venice Film Festival.
UNDER THE AUSPICES OF



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