Niki and Dante: Aging and Death in Contemporary Romanian Cinema (Critical Essay‪)‬

1. Introduction How do we relate to everyday life in a problematic past? How do we reconcile a traumatic history with the quotidian present? And, more importantly, how does someone who has little or no direct knowledge of this past relate to it and to those who have actually lived through it? Even twenty years after the fall of communism, these are still very pertinent questions in Eastern Europe, perhaps more so in Romania, where the grotesqueries of Ceausescu's dictatorship, the bloody revolution that ended it, and its dubious aftermath give recent history an especially resonant dimension.