Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu’s masterly exploration of moral compromise and bureaucratic corruption, told through a captivating and intricately plotted family drama that grips like a thriller. Romeo, a doctor living in a small mountain town in Transylvania, has raised his daughter Eliza with the idea that once she turns 18, she will leave to study abroad in the UK. But on the day before Eliza’s first entrance exam to university, she is assaulted in an attack that could jeopardise her entire future. Now Romeo has a decision to make: there are ways of solving her predicament, but not without betraying the moral principles that he, as a father, has taught Eliza throughout her life. Winner of the Best Director prize at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, ‘Graduation’ is a stunningly crafted morality play from one of European cinema’s most revered auteurs. Executed with intricate formal precision and Mungiu’s characteristically raw and authentic form of naturalism, ‘Graduation’ is the mark of a filmmaker at the height of his powers.
