This nostalgic drama was the most watched domestic film in Romanian cinemas in 2017, and if IMDB is to be believed, it won a film directed by not-so-famous Romanian filmmaker Serge Ioan Celebidachi more than a hundred awards at various festivals and film year selections. Still, “Octav” is not one of the highlights of Romanian creativity, it is obvious, but regardless of that, it is a solid film about an old man who returned home after a decade of absence. It seems to me that the plot of the film takes place sometime in the 1990s, and Octav (Marcel Iures) is a man in his seventies who decided to return to Romania after the fall of communism. After we see in the introductory scenes that after years of retreating through the courts he has managed to reclaim family property stolen under communism, he returns to the house where he spent his childhood and youth in the province.
And it’s not an ordinary house. It is one of those aristocratic majestic villas worth millions of euros today and the original plan of the old single man who spent most of his life in Paris is to sell the house. But when he gets there and realizes that his peer Spiridon (Victor Reberniuc), with whom he was a childhood friend and who is now the caretaker of the estate, still lives in a nearby service house, will start to doubt. Especially when he begins to have memories and recollections from his childhood and youth, and Octav will increasingly begin to return to his childhood. It has this drama and elements of fantasy because everything that happened when he was a boy, Octav will now relive and we will slowly learn his life story and the story of his family which obviously after World War II and the advent of communism did not go well. Rating 6.5 / 10.
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