Maramures (2000)

This film is set in northern Rumania at Christmas, 1999. Nelu, a student, lives in Baia Mare, a mining city at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Petru, a violinist, lives a few kilometers away in Valeni, a village situated on the other side of the mountains. This is the land of the Maramures, an ancient people who have known how to preserve their identity over the centuries by absorbing only some of the "external" elements that have been inevitably left by their numerous invaders - the Roman and Ottoman Empires, and, lastly, the dictatorship of Ceausescu.