Constantin Țăpîrdea

Ciulei’s second feature recalls the best of Fritz Lang and Michael Curtiz in its WWII-era espionage tale, set on a barge transporting Nazi munitions up the Danube. Ciulei himself givers a superb performance as Mihai, the barge captain forced to navigate the heavily mined waters along with his new bride, Ana (Irina Petrescu). As the journey wears on, Mihai becomes increasingly suspicious of one of his crew, ex-convict Toma (Lazar Vrabie), and his intentions towards Ana. But Toma has a far graver—and potentially deadly—secret to conceal.

A star of a small town soccer team gets involved with the pretty sister of his main rival in the team.

Darclee is a lead singer for an opera company in Romania with a heavy load of responsibility. It seems the company is in dire need of a decent physical structure for their performances and a brace -- or more -- of good singers to improve their image and sales. In other words, they need just about everything except an excellent lead singer; Darclee fills that bill. And so the company rather unfairly leans on her to get the people and the funds they so desperately want.

The communists are taking over the boyar land and do the agrarian reform.

A bourgeois family life in Romania around the time of the Great Peasant Uprising of 1907.

The title translates as Fools of Bărăgan, in reference to a band of beleaguered feudal Rumanian peasants. But these are no fools: instead, they are fearless freedom fighters, organizing a brave (though foredoomed) revolt against the tyranny of the landowners. The parallels drawn between the people of Bărăgan and Russia's revolutionary leaders are all but impossible to miss. It would have been nice, however, if the story had not been told in such a heavy-handed, spell-it-all-out fashion.