Holy Week (2023)

Săptămâna Mare (2023)

- Drama - -

Synopsis: The Holy Week, around 1900, somewhere in Romania. The tense relationship between the Jewish innkeeper Leiba and Gheorghe, his Christian employee, reaches the point where the innkeeper decides to expel the latter. Revengeful, Gheorghe promises Leiba that he will return on Easter Night to “settle” his accounts. This threat comes as a last straw against Leiba’s attempts to cohabit with his hostile, anti-Semitic environment. From then on, Leiba will struggle to distinguish between the real danger and the one fabricated by his anxieties, engaging onto a path of transformation leading to extreme consequences.

Director: Andrei Cohn

Writer: Andrei Cohn, IL Caragiale

Stars: Iulian Postelnicu, Bogdan Farcaș, Doru Bem

Photo Gallery:

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Casting:

	Doru Bem	Leiba
	Iulian Postelnicu
	Bogdan Farcaș	Lutu

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Produced By

Mandragora
in co-production with Edge Frame (Elveția) & Shellac (France)

Production info

Shot entirely on location at the Oltina lake, in the Constanța county, in April-May 2022.
Budget: 1,25 mil euro, with 400.000 euro from CNC.

Festivals, Awards

2024 - Berlinale Forum - Giuseppe Becce Award

Trivia

Andrei Cohn about the film:
“Like every other form of discrimination, anti-Semitism is repulsive, and this is why it intrigues me how a part of the Jewish population could have gone from being the victim to being an aggressor. How is it psychologically possible for an individual persecuted in the place where he was born to make an exodus at the end of which he recreates the same social relations toward a different community that made him leave in the first place? Is not this fateful vicious circle simple proof of the fact that prior to the differences of belonging to a particular community, there are more things that unite us than separate us?”,

Articles

„Săptămâna Mare”, Premiul „Giuseppe Becce” la Berlinale