The Moromete Family

Captured in black-and-white, the private stories of the Moromete family are placed in the context of a rapidly changing Romanian society, in Stere Gulea’s sublime 1987 adaptation of Marin Preda’s novel Moromeţii.

Though perhaps at first an ambitious or intimidating project, to adapt Martin Preda’s 1967 epic novel of the same name, Stere Gulea’s The Moromete Family film trilogy has proven to become a classic of Romanian cinema.

The Moromete Family explores the private lives of the Moromete family in the rural south of Romania during the interwar period. Always mixing the personal with the political, Gulea’s film traces how the most intimate aspects of life – marriage, taxes, friendship, rivalry – are affected by the political changes grasping a rapidly developing Romanian society.

With its deeply human depiction of rural life, Gulea ran into minor problems once a finished cut of The Moromete Family was screened to Romanian censors, who criticised the honest portrayal of the impoverished villagers on screen. Gulea was however able to postpone the suggested revisions of the film, and managed to release his opus, the way he intended, to a Romanian audience of over two million viewers. 

IFFR 2025 will present The Moromete Family: On the Edge of Time (2018) and The Moromete Family 3: Father and Son (2024), the remaining instalments of Gulea’s The Moromete Family trilogy. 

– Hugo Emmerzael

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