Christian Mungiu admitted at Cannes that those acclaimed films have been little popular at home.
One of Eastern Europe's most acclaimed filmmakers, Romania's Cristian Mungiu, is back at the Cannes Film Festival with a dark story about how little time it takes people to turn on their neighbors.
His gruesome Ceauescu-era drama about illegal abortion "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days" took home the top prize at the World's Top Cinema Showcase in 2007.
Mungiu also won Best Screenplay for 2012's "Beyond the Hills" and Best Director for "Graduation" in 2016.
His new film, "RMN", sees him race to the Palme d'Or again, and the 54-year-old told AFP it explores the collapse of hopes for a new era of peace after the end of the Cold War.
"I try to speak about human nature and the state of the world today, and about the feeling that things are not going in the right direction as we have today," he said.
"Things are ending somehow and everyone feels this concern," he said, "at least not over the ongoing war in Ukraine."
- Capable of doing anything
RMN is the Romanian acronym for MRI, which Mungiu said when scanning the brain could reveal fascinating secrets about how humans are wired.
The film explores the concerns of a multi-ethnic community in Transylvania, a historical crossroads of migration and competing empires that have left Romanian, Hungarian and German speakers living together to this day.
It is inspired by a story widely covered by Romanian media in 2020, when a village in Transylvania stood up against a local bakery for hiring two Sri Lankans.
In the film, foreign men are recruited into a bread factory dependent on EU grants and offered minimum-wage jobs that have long been left unfulfilled because wages were too low for the locals.
A manager tries to care for displaced Sri Lankans, who speak no local language and are struggling to integrate.
A violent attack leads to a confrontation with the police, the village priest, and finally a town meeting in which hysterical fear is transmitted about outsiders.
Mungiu said that his aim is to "place a mirror to the instincts and cruelty deep inside us as human animals and to see that those who are neighbors today are capable of anything tomorrow - raping, killing someone else." And torture just because someone said I am this enemy".
- a stir -
The film garnered warm reviews, with The Guardian stating that the film is "severely intertwined with procrastination and unhappiness in Europe that goes unpunished and unacknowledged".
US movie website IndieWire called it another "moral thriller" by Mungiu, which "draws harder and harder on the tension between the complex socioeconomic forces and the simple human emotions they inspire".
Mungiu is part of the New Wave of Romanian filmmakers tracking the realities of the post-communist transition, which has won awards at international festivals for the past two decades.
He admitted at Cannes that those acclaimed films have been little popular at home.
"(Romanians) don't really like what we do - they don't really understand why someone likes it elsewhere," he said.
“But it is really important to us that we managed to create a movement of some sort that is now quite complex – quite a variety of filmmakers expressing themselves.
"At some point I think it will be considered something good that we did for Romania's culture as well."
The Palme d'Or will be honored on 28 May. (AFP)