ICR Romanian Cultural Institute London

99 steps on grass

       

Ambassador Dr Ion Jinga & Sherban Cantacuzino; Lawn coming alive; Tony Byrne, Gabriela Massaci and H-R Patapievici,
April 2008

We had a busy year in 2007, Romania's first as EU member: we organized an invasion.
99 arts events from the Romanian Cultural Institute & friends outlined the novel, exuberant, surprising, disturbing, eccentric profile of Romanian arts&culture.

The romantic & realistic story is told in this 9' 09'' film.

The footage comes from our own gifted-amateurs' DVD exploits and from professional camera-artists like Laurentiu Garofeanu or TVR's Camelia Csiki's team.
The editing comes from Catalin Cristutiu, who moved serenely from editing work like California Dreamin' to piecing together our mountain of unevenly-recorded footage.
The launch happened in April at a party at our place during at the London Book Fair - when we decked-up the main-hall of 1 Belgrave Square in a real-life grass-lawn carpet.
The grass spoke softly about the friendly, win-win arts & culture battlefields (and only mildly inconvenienced our elegant lady-guests wearing high-heeled shoes. Their delight in arts prevailed however.)
The encouragement to broadcast the film comes from our first expermental audience described above. Thank you! Here goes:

Arts Invasion: 99 Steps (Invazie culturala in 99 de pasi).
The film received the Erasmus EuroMedia Seal at the award ceremony in Vienna (October 2008).