Invasion of the Euro-Movies

12:08 East of Bucharest will be at 7:00 pm tonight and 9:00 pm tomorrow night at the Harvard Film Archive. Kusskuss will be at 8:45 pm tonight at the Harvard Film Archive.

Two of the most interesting movies of the 7th Annual New Films From Europe Festival at the Harvard Film Archive are screening tonight.

Obviously, there's plenty of movies on the HFA festival agenda, but 12:08 East of Bucharest and Kusskuss appear to break out of the "pretentious foreign film" category.

12:08 East of Bucharest reads like a mashup of a Christopher Guest movie and Goodbye, Lenin! This movie, which won the Camera d'Or at Cannes, covers life in Romania after the fall of Ceausescu. On the sixteenth anniversary of the revolution, a small-town TV host gathers together two local men for a call-in show on how much their little town participated in the revolution. However, the three men and the callers can't get the events straight.

The second movie on the double bill, Kusskuss, plays on public, private, and global anxieties. In this drama, a supposedly stable romance implodes after a woman finds and illegal immigrant and brings her home to protect her.

Poster of 12:08 East of Bucharest from BacFilms.com.