Cristian Mungiu is skeptical. The writer/director/producer just got wind of the fact that my favourite film of the festival (and thus far this year) was his own 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days, and he didn’t quite buy it. He asked me why and I didn’t know where to begin.

“For starters, the film about two girls seeking an illegal abortion during the late-communist era of Romania is an emotional tour-de-force and is as honest and efficient as they come. But that’s just what’s on the surface. Peeling away the complex relationship between the girls at the film’s centre seems to reveal a social poverty in excess of the decrepit state of the crumbling buildings.”

After hearing something like that Mungiu should be more convinced. Yet I remained puzzled as to why this director should criticize flattery. After all, I’m certainly not alone in dishing it out. Mungiu has already received the same compliment from the jury of the Cannes Film Festival last May, when he beat out the likes of Quentin Tarantino (Death Proof) and the Coen Brothers (No Country For Old Men) to win the coveted Palme D’Or.

No doubt his Cannes victory is a crowning achievement, but many are prematurely declaring it to be evidence of a new wave in Romanian cinema. Mungiu’s contemporaries Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) and the late Cristian Nemescu (California Dreamin’) deserve their status as fine filmmakers but Mungiu is hesitant to give this burgeoning national industry such a strong classification.

“It is a new wave from the perspective that we all belong to the same decade of filmmakers,” says Mungiu. “We are all people from 30 to 40 years of age. We all achieved national recognition at pretty much the same time. But it is not a wave in that we share a common view about cinema; and this is actually what I like about it. We don’t necessarily make the same kind of films.”

Indeed, while all of the noted Romanian films do sustain some form of fearless social commentary and an unquestionable degree of realism (“telling the story without using any kind of tricks,” is how he puts it), Mungiu’s approach in 4 Months is less direct than the others, as it observes rather than criticizes, and does so strictly through its characters.

“What was important was not to forget that we were making a film about people,” the director points out, “not about the period, not about the objects, not about the nostalgia for the period or what we can still remember, and not even about abortion or about communism. It’s about this day in the life of the characters. I wanted to relate a little bit about the period from the inside, from the perspective of everyday life, not to talk about communism in general, but about how people were affected by the consequences of having to live through it.”

Although Mungiu downplays it, the pivotal motivation of the characters is obtaining an illegal abortion, a topic with very specific implications not only for the director but also his entire generation.

Abortions were banned by the communist government in1966, and it’s this very legislature that both caused a baby-boom in Romania and prevented Mungiu’s own parents from seeking out a termination, resulting in his own birth.

“This is a film for my generation of people,” says the director, “because our parents were hiding this from us. I came into this world because of that law. There’s a certain solidarity among people that were born because of this.”

Though these circumstances would certainly influence the Mungiu to take a firm standing on the matters of abortion and communism, he would rather keep such opinions off-the-record for the sake of the film’s own democratic terms, which he hopes will encourage free and open discussion.

“For me it’s important that the film stays a film; and the film doesn’t take a side and the film doesn’t tell you what to do. I have a very strong personal belief about this, but it shouldn’t be in the film. I don’t like that kind of education, when somebody tells you what to do or think, it isn’t very useful.”