Nunta de Piatra

Drawing more on the heightened realism of indigenous folk ritual and storytelling traditions than on the Socialist Realist intentions of the state, this almost wordless cine-poem, operating with the most slender of plots but the oldest of narratives, is an often compelling experience. A listless girl is to be married, lovelessly, into the conventional hierarchy of a Romanian town, squatting in a bare, out-of-time landscape. Her mother makes a hard living gathering and breaking rocks, and is soon forced to sell the essential mule for a wedding dress. Come the day, and the attentions of a nomadic musician capture the birch girl's eyes and heart. Cinematic kin to Paradjanov, Peleshyan and, perhaps most closely, the wonderful Georgian film Pirosmani, Stone Wedding is imbued with the stillness of deep time (the horse immobile as rock, figures tiny against the vast quarry), and deploys the keenest of gazes in tableaux that soon lift from mere attention into Morandi-esque focus. We are people living on earth, the green thread of yearning in our song holding us taut all lifelong until we sink, the film hymns.