Mandragora Movies

Viorel, a quiet, upright tractor driver from a small town in west Romania meets Mocanu, a high profile politician campaigning for a seat in the European Parliament. Mocanu’s car has broken down nearby and Viorel and his wife welcome the politician into their h...

It's Maxim's birthday. He's 8 years old. He lives together only with his mother in a village not so close to the big city. For his birthday, his mother will take him to Bucharest, to McDonald's. There, Maxim hopes to meet his father.

The story of Victor, a 45-year-old rocker, whose love for his son Florin go beyond what is socially and morally acceptable. The father's everyday life is orbiting around his son, a drug addict.

On July 19–21, 2001, over 200,000 people took to the streets of Genoa to protest against the ongoing G8 summit. Anti-globalization activists clashed with the police, with 23-year-old protester Carlo Giuliani shot dead after confronting a police vehicle. In the...

Seeking shelter in her work from the pain of a breakup, Lena, a painter turning 40, is commissioned to decorate a brutalist luxury hotel nestled in the depths of the Romanian forest. There, where the Danube ends its course in seemingly miraculous springs, Lena...

NELU, a man in his forties, works as a security guard in the local supermarket in Salonta, a small town on the Romanian-Hungarian border. This is the place where many illegal emigrants try to cross, by any means posible, to Hungary and then further to Western...

Back from a professional trip to Paris, a neurologist at the pinnacle of his career has to pick up his wife so that they can attend a family meal to commemorate his father, who died a year before. At his mother's flat, the guests are waiting for the priest to...

A taciturn Romanian divorcee acquires a hunting rifle and initiates a killing spree.

After suffering terrible headaches and stomach cramps, Mr. Lăzărescu, a lonely 63 year-old man, calls for an ambulance, beginning one man’s hellish journey through Bucharest hospitals in search of proper medical care. As the night unfolds, his health starts to...

Cristiana is a 30 year old woman, brought up in a "proper", bourgeois middle-class family. Her time is split between writing for her PhD in Earthquake Engineering, conversations with Alex and Michelle, her two close friends and occasional, eagerly awaited rend...

While people in Western Europe were used to choose between hundreds of brands, the communist Romanian used to have a different experience: all our life we lived with only one brand for each basic product. Imagine the importance that this 'mono-brands' could ac...

Dreaming of the West, Boryana is determined not to have a child in communist Bulgaria. Nonetheless, her daughter Viktoria enters the world in 1979, curiously missing a belly button, and is declared the country’s Baby of the Decade. Pampered by her mother state...

In 1940, in Sinaia, in central Romania, on Saint Andrew's Day, Ionel Hațieganu, Sacha, Amy, Hegheduș and Rakovsky become the protagonists of an eventful story, in which the echoes of war begin to be heard and betrayal becomes the norm.

Among the guests who come to the mansion of aristocratic landowner Nikolai over Christmas are a politician, a young countess, and a general with his wife. They dine and discuss topics such as progress and morality. As the debate becomes more heated, cultural d...

For 45-year-old artist Sarah, this is not a hypothetical issue. With her parents' 50th wedding anniversary approaching, they give her an ultimatum: she has one month to leave the family home. After a lifetime of being protected and supported by them, Sarah is...

Ana and Paul are trying to take advantage of a break at work to go shopping at a home and garden store. Paul is on the phone the whole time, while Ana strikes up a conversation with a salesperson. Is his help more than just a kind gesture?

A trio of quirky lifelong friends create a makeshift family, but their tight bond is tested when one of them falls in love with a writer.

Different portraits, four short stories, four moments in time capturing the wanderings of a few souls, stuck at the crossroads of History.

A film director undergoes the traumatic experience of the death of his young daughter. But the artistic use of personal life comes with its own cost.

Chronologically, night by night, you can feel like you are there for the shooting of the film, next to the director, the actors, the director of photography, the sound engineer and all the others that created the story of Mr. Lazarescu. A making of that answer...