Radu Mihăileanu

Radu Mihăileanu ( born April 23, 1958 in Bucharest ) is a Romanian- French film director.

Life

Radu Mihăileanu, grew up as a child of Holocaust survivors in Communist Romania, fled in 1980 from Romania and lived in Israel for several years before he settled in France. In Paris, he began to study film and worked since 1985 as an assistant director. The film Trahir was his directorial debut, which brought him back to his native Romania in 1993. The Romanian actress Maia Morgenstern played the lead role. The international breakthrough came in 1998 with his second feature film train of Life ( Train de Vie ), which tells the equally humorous and tragic story of a Jewish village during the Second World War. The villagers make an alleged deportation ago to dress up as Nazis and so try to escape across the Soviet Union to Palestine.

His third film production presented Mihăileanu 2005 at the International Film Festival in Berlin in the Panorama section. In the film Live and Become (Va, vis et deviens ) he tells the story of the Ethiopian Jews, of whom 1984 thousands were secretly brought to Israel. The film won the Audience Award. On 4 April 2006 the German cinema premiere of the film took place in presence of the director in Berlin ( Hackescher yards ). In a subsequent dialogue with the audience he addressed, among others, its integration problems in France, but also its identity in Romania: " In France, I am for the people in Romania Romanian and I am French. I do not speak any of the languages ​​without an accent and initially had trouble with my identity. Today I see this biculturalism but as an enrichment. "

Has also been awarded several prizes Mihaileanu's The Concert. The film tells the story of a former conductor of the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre (played by Alexei Guskov ), who had fallen out of favor decades ago because of his advocacy for musicians of Jewish origin and then earned his living as a janitor. By chance to offer him the chance to work with his old fellow musicians perform the Violin Concerto by Tchaikovsky in Paris ( among others Mélanie Laurent with ).

In 2011 Mihăileanu presented, following the tradition to bring in the center who refuse water from the mountain region in the source of women women of a small village in North Africa. The film with Hafsia Herzi, Leila Bekhti, Zinedine Soualem and Sabrina Ouazani in the lead roles brought the director one of his first invitation to compete in the International Film Festival of Cannes.

Radu Mihăileanu lived in Paris since 2006.

Filmography

B = screenplay, P = Production, R = Director