Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Original Title: A fost sau n-a fost?
Language: Romanian

Main Cast: Ion Sapdaru, Teodor Corban, Mircea Andreescu, Luminita Gheorghiu

12:08 PM, 22 Dec, 1989. After a week of public unrest and bloody street battles, Romania’s communist president Nicolae Ceaușescu was forced to flee the capital Bucharest in a helicopter with his wife Elena. The ignominious moment of Ceaușescu’s attempted escape, broadcast live on television throughout the nation, was the turning point in a revolution that would see Ceaușescu arrested, tried and summarily executed within days, ending a corrupt and brutal dictatorship that had spanned more than two decades.
Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East Of Bucharest is a bittersweet retrospective of this historic day and its significance (or otherwise) for those who were at the margins, rather than in the centre, of the uprising.

Set in an unnamed eastern town on the sixteenth anniversary of the revolution, the film (whose original Romanian title translates as ‘Was There Or Wasn’t There?’) offers a wry investigation of just how ‘popular’ the revolution was outside of Bucharest, and what real difference it has made to the misery of life in the provinces.