Milk Teeth

Romania, 1989. The twilight of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. In a small, isolated town, Maria, a ten-year-old girl, becomes the last witness to her sister’s mysterious disappearance. Torn apart by the loss, she tries to make sense of a new, terrifying reality. Can she summon up the courage to grow up in a collapsing world?

Free screening. Advance booking is recommended.

Elusive, troubling and densely-crafted both visually and sonically, Milk Teeth is not quite like any film we have yet seen from contemporary Romanian cinema. It combines the everyday realism associated with Romania’s New Wave cinema with an imagistic, sometimes hallucinatory style evoking the intensity of childhood perception. It’s also a depiction of a very specific moment — the time immediately prior to the fall of the Ceausescu regime, its young heroine representing Romania’s so-called ’lost generation’ of children.

Jonathan Romney, Screen International

Loaded with atmosphere and allegory, Mincan crafts a superb coming-of-age story that eloquently tackles a generational zeitgeist of 1980s Romania.

Andrew Murray, The Upcoming