A couple of hotels have been burned down, no small coincidence in itself. Lives have been lost. Detective Inspector Florin Iespas (Bogdan Farcas) is convinced he can crack the case, and tries to persuade his boss to let him do just that while the assigned detective is away on leave. He’s turned down, but persists, fixating on the Roma security guard as his prime suspect. But Detective Iespas’s own motives are murkier than they first appear…
A former criminal defence attorney (prior to studying – and now teaching – film at Columbia), Bogdan George Apetri returned to his home town in northern Romania to make two crime films simultaneously, Unidentified and Miracle, with the same crew and overlapping casts. Both are screening at the VIFF Centre this week. Unidentified, which won two awards at the Warsaw Film Festival in 2019, is a terse, tense thriller reminiscent of the twisted psychological noir novels of Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me; The Getaway). It’s a bitter, pessimistic movie, offset by wide swathes of Chopin…
A dark, propulsive thriller….
Screen Daily
Bogdan George Apetri
Bogdan Farcas, Dragos Dumitru, Vasile Muraru, Emanuel Parvu, Olimpia Malai, Andrei Aradits
Romania
2020
In Romanian with English subtitles
Special Jury Awards, Directing and Acting, Warsaw 2020
Credits
Executive Producer
Minodora Şerban
Producer
Florian Şerban
Screenwriter
Bogdan George Apetri, Iulian Postelnicu
Cinematography
Oleg Mutu
Editor
Bogdan George Apetri