Arest

August 1983, somewhere in Romania. Architect Dinu is spending a perfect summer’s day with his family on the beach, but the idyll is shattered by the arrival of the police. For reasons unknown, Dinu is arrested and immediately hauled off to prison. There he finds himself sharing a cell with Vali, a small-time crook who soon proves much more sinister than a mere fellow inmate. In this, his second film, talented director Andrei Cohn makes full use of the confined space of a squalid cell: Using resourceful compositions, he conjures up a chilling metaphor of the totalitarian regime, whose imaginative brutality, bordering on absurd farce, goes way beyond the imagination of all those who never experienced it for themselves. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)