“Beyond the Hills” also won the grand prize in the Filmmakers of Tomorrow category at the Haifa Film Festival and the best film award at the festivals in Vukovar, Croatia, and Herceg Novi, in Montenegro. Radu Jude’s “Everybody in Our family” was the first Romanian production to be selected for a Class A film festival. It was screened in the Forum section at the Berlin International Film Festival. In summer, this production won the grand prize at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where it received the Heart of Sarajevo Trophy. Radu Jude’s film also won the Bayard d’Or award for best film from a Francophone country, while Serban Pavlu won the jury’s best actor award at the Namur Film Festival in Belgium.

“Everybody in Our Family” is a humorous take on the sad story of a father and daughter who wish to spend the perfect holiday together but are caught in the nightmare of family relations. Tudor Giurgiu, another Romanian film maker, won the best short film award by the European Film Academy for “Superman, Spiderman, Batman”. It was also in 2012 that Giurgiu finished his latest fiction film entitled “Of Men and Snails”, which was very popular with the local audiences, enjoying the largest number of spectators among Romanian productions.

The film is set in a Romanian town in the early 1990s, at a bankrupt factory making ARO, a Romanian off-road vehicle. Everything changes when one of the workers comes up with an unconventional solution to save his colleagues from unemployment and the factory from being closed down. 2012 also saw the cinema debut of a Romanian theatre director known for his impressive performances. His film, entitled “Somewhere in Palilu” was an allegory of communism.