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Mircea Mureșan


  • Director, Screenwriter, Actor
  • Born: 11.11.1928 in Sibiu
  • Died: 24.04.2020 in București

Mircea Mureşan is one of the important Romanian filmmakers who started his career in the `60s and the only one of his generations who, from the very first steps he took in the cinema world, received international recognition after receiving the Opera Prima Award at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1966.He was born and raised in Sibiu, the town whose citizen of honour he is at present. When he was a child, he dreamed of making films ever since he was 11 years old, after watching the classic Gunga Din, starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine. He imagined that the frames of a painting on the wall make a small screen, on which he could watch many things that happened, while staying in bed.
He graduated film directing at the Institute of Film and Theatre in 1955 and made his debut with Autumn Is Coming..., starring Vasilica Tastaman şi Dumitru Furdui. The film awarded in Cannes, The Uprising, opens the series of book-to-film adaptations, which represented a constant and important part of his work, next to the comedies, adventure films and epic dramas. He directed 21 films, out of which 9 were made based on his own screenplays, or written in collaboration.
He was the vicepresident of the Filmmakers Association (ACIN) from 1974 until 1989. At present he is the general manager of Dacin Sara, an institution which has as its goal to defend and represent the patrimonial author rights of the film and audiovisual authors.


Trivia

  • During high school he attended for three years the classes of a local conservatory in Sibiu, after which he was hired as an actor at the State Theatre of Sibiu.
  • He made the military service at the cinema Studio of the army.
  • At the recently opened Institute of Film and Theatre, his professor was Dinu Negreanu and his assistant was Savel Stiopul.
  • In 1995, after graduating the IATC, he was assigned to be an assistant director at the Bucharest Film Studio
  • He was married to the actress Rodica Mureşan, for whom he writed and directed the feature film Return to the First Love (1981). The part of Ana, the woman who after a long time met her first love, represented Rodica Mureşan`s debut in film.
  • He is good friends with the actor Ion Besoiu, who is also from Sibiu; Ion Besoiu is in many of his films: You Are Guilty Too (1963), The Uprising (1965), The Barrier (1972), Shots Under the Moonlight (1977), Full Sail – the TV series(1977), Ion, the Lust for the Land, the lust for Love (1980), Horea (1984), Full Sail – the big screen version (1986)
  • His first option for the part of Vitoria Lipan in The Hatchet was Sophia Loren, who couldn`t join the project, because she was pregnant at that time. He finally chose Margarita Lazano, Clint Eastwood`s partner in Sergio Leone`s film, A Fistful of Dollars (1964).
  • In 1981-1982, he directed the TV series Lights and Shadows together with Andrei Blaier şi Mihai Constantinescu.
  • He had a love story for five years with the pop singer Mihaela Mihai. He cast her in two of his feature films: The Siege (1970) and The Barrier (1972)
  • Jean Constantin, the actor who played Ismail in Full Sail told the story of how he beat Mircea Mureşan, who played the part of a pirate. “The funniest memory was when I simply beat the director. Mircea Mureşan was playing a pirate in the film and I was supposed to hit him with a soup ladle. In order to protect himself from my most “authentic” gesture, he put a bowl under his cap, but I still hit him hard…”
  • In 2015 his autobiographical book “The Bag with Films” is published (Cinetipar)
Mircea Mureşan about...
…his first contact with the film: “I was very shocked by the first films I saw. In kindergarten, somebody came with a projector and we were shown The Passions of Christ. A silent film. I can still hear the raucous sound of the projector which fascinated me…there were so many things it could do…alive photographs…and the silence of the children in the room. A bit later on, I saw Gunga Din.” (Adevărul, 2008)
…art of the actor: “No director in the world can incarnate so many endless lives that he could aasimilate and selectively pass on to an actor, who ought to be a unique, unrepeatable character.” (Adevărul, 2008)
…film history: “In Hollywood, in the glory days from between the two world wars, they tried to make only films to entertain the viewers. For money, of course. But some masterpieces were made, as well. Not many, but lasting. Stagecoach from 1939, directed by John Ford is, maybe, the film which had the strongest impact on me, professionally speaking, at the beginning. So, I consider myself a ‘story teller’. “(Adevărul, 2008)