Graduation
NYFF Favorites
•
2h 7m
Leaving December 1
Directed by Cristian Mungiu | 127 mins | 2016
Nine years after his Palme d’Or-winning breakout—the abortion drama "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"—"Graduation" landed Cristian Mungiu his third major award at Cannes, this time for best director. He returns to the murky backwaters of institutional corruption, following high schooler Eliza (Maria-Victoria Drăguș) as she undertakes her final exams. But after a brutal attack leaves her injured and throws her overseas college scholarship into danger, her father, a doctor (Adrian Titieni), must consider less-than-scrupulous methods to secure her future—in a tragic face-off between morality and desperation.
Up Next in NYFF Favorites
-
Hyenas
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 110 mins | 1992
One of the treasures of contemporary cinema, Senegalese master Mambéty made his long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki with this hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The ... -
Music
Leaving December 1
Directed by Angela Schanelec | 105 mins | 2023
Winner of the 2023 Berlinale Best Screenplay prize, Angela Schanelec’s oblique but vivid film transposes “Oedipus Rex” to contemporary Greece—though Sophocles’ tragedy is here distilled beyond easy recognition, with the rigor char... -
Stranger by the Lake
Leaving December 1
Directed by Alain Guiraudie | 100 mins | 2013
Lauded and laureled at Cannes, Guiradie’s understated, simmeringly sensual thriller explores the proximity of Eros and Thanatos in an idyllic, lakeside nude beach/cruising spot—shot for maximum pastoral splendor by DP Claire Mathon...
