Police, Adjective

Director Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST) interrogates the ways in which draconian authority, bureaucracy, and even language continue to shape life in post-Communist Romania in this morally complex, slow-burn take on the police procedural. Cristi (Dragoș Bucur) is a police officer who has a crisis of conscience when he is ordered to follow a group of pot-smoking teenagers he believes are doing nothing wrong. His superior’s rigid interpretation of the law sets up a clash of values that speaks to the uneasy relationship between legal systems and lived reality.