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Romanian Capitalism on FilmMicrohistories of Hope, Anxiety and Adaptation

By Constantin Parvulescu and Claudiu Turcuș

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Published 30 April 2027. Can be pre-ordered from 30 October 2026

About this book

Discusses how Romanian cinema represents the development of post-1989 Romanian economy and society

  • Delivers in-depth analyses of masterpieces of the New Romanian Cinema
  • Exploits of the historical testimony of contemporary film
  • Considers close to 100 contemporary Romanian films
  • Proposes a different angle for understanding the rise of postsocialist capitalism

Romanian Capitalism on Film examines quality contemporary Romanian cinema as a testimony to pivotal aspects of Romania’s post-socialist economy and culture, providing enlightening insights into an emerging capitalist culture.

Approaching the cinematic text as an archive for cultural and economic history, the book focuses on key feature films of the New Romanian Cinema and proposes a methodological framework for analysing moving images as histories of the present. It explores the economic imagination of emerging entrepreneurial classes, the value of human life within neoliberal contexts, the struggles of the middle and working classes during periods of radical economic and social transformation, the mental mapping of globalization from a European periphery, and emigration as a form of economic revenge.

Reviews

‘This is a study that disrupts the patronising view of Eastern Europe as only “catching up” – instead, it foregrounds the advantages of the peripheral vantage with its own capacity to narrate Europe’s contradictions back to its core. Romanian Capitalism on Film is not only a major contribution to film studies and cultural history. It is, in the deepest sense, a warning and an invitation: to read the screen as testimony, to recover small truths, and to reckon with the unfinished story of Europe’s essentialised “margins”.’
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Histories of the Present

1. Grand Narratives, Slow Transformations

2. Romanian Cinema’s Postsocialist Intervention – An Overview

3. Postsocialist Entrepreneurship

4. Human Capital

5. The Educated Strike Back

6. Global Romania

7. Work and the Working Class

Conclusion: The Endgame – Migration

Bibliography

Index

About the contributors

Constantin Parvulescu

CONSTANTIN PARVULESCU is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Director of the Janovics Center for Screen and Performing Arts and Head of the Master’s Program in Film and Audiovisual Studies at Babeș-Bolyai University. He has written several articles on the political cinema of Europe, film and economic history, and Eastern European film cultures. He is the author of Orphans of the East: Postwar Eastern European Cinema and the Revolutionary Subject (2015) and the editor of Global Finance on Screen: From Wall Street to Side Street (2017).

Claudiu Turcuș

CLAUDIU TURCUȘ is Associate Professor and Dean of the School of Theatre and Film within Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj. He published widely on topics such as the cultural memory of Socialism, the intellectual history and representations of post-1989 transition, and the aesthetics of the New Romanian Cinema. His book, Norman Manea: Aesthetics as East Ethics (2016) is the very first monograph about the life and oeuvre of this important Romanian-American writer.