“Let us mind our words, the west is watching,” says the local mayor, hoping to calm a worked-up crowd of Transylvanian villagers. But the villagers don’t mind their words. Gathered in a packed cultural centre to vent their anger about three Sri Lankans hired by the local bakery, they are angry at everything: the closure of the nearby mine; the villagers who have left for better-paid jobs in Germany and the workload in those jobs that remain; the west’s supposed assault on the nuclear family; the hypocritical European Union. “We got rid of the gypsies,” one irate man in the crowd bellows, “and now we fight over foreigners?”
It’s just one scene from RMN, the new film by Cristian Mungiu, a Palme d’Or-winning director whose work has opened up his homeland Romania to the scrutinising gaze of western European cinema audiences. When Mungiu toured the film around European festivals last year, some people in the Q&A sessions afterwards assumed that the opinions of the villagers were also his.
