Stalinist cruelty against women: Christian Mungiu’s Film 4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days

by Owen Hsieh, August 18, 2026 

Amid its curated collection of Romanian New Wave films the Criterion Channels recently added a socially significant film: 4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days by Christian Mungiu. Available via Criterion Channel’s Romanian New Wave Retrospective this film deserves comment as it highlighted a topic of social concern under those who lived through Romanian Stalinism: “Illegal abortion and its tragic consequences on numberless female destinies”.[1] This intense film is set in Romania 1987, shortly before the overthrow and execution of Ceausescu in 1989; It features two female dorm students who seek an illegal abortion and are thus imperilled.

Going against the current of merely satirising and poking fun at the idiocies of Ceausescu, (a trend which in he once took part with the making of his first feature film: Occident (2002)), it is to his credit that Mungiu instead opted to make a serious feature drama and analyse the brutal realities of Romanian Stalinism. It was noted that a turning point for Mungiu here was a young reader examining an early script for Tales from a Golden Age (2009), and blithely remarking “Life under communism seems to have been a lot of fun”.[2] Mungiu thereafter sought to educating a younger generation of what Romanian Stalinism was actually like.

Christian Mungiu

This is however not on the usual level of a crude anti-communist film, but is quite a sophisticated work. Mungiu collected various oral histories of the period and was able to “…chronicle in an extremely accurate way the terror of everyday life during the last days of one of the most oppressive dictatorships in Eastern Europe”.[3] 4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days won the Cannes Palme D’Or at its debut screening, along with a slew of other prizes that year. According to one critic: ‘it remains the most acclaimed Romanian production of the last decades’.[4]

The two protagonists Otilia and Gabita are university students sharing a single room dorm. Gabita is pregnant. Early in the film they travel to a neighbouring town and book a hotel room, arranging to meet an abortionist. In response to Ceausescu’s reactionary pro-natal laws, the arrangements are quite discrete and carefully coordinated. There are some minor changes of plans which incense the man that they have to meet. Upon his arrival at the hotel, he deploys extreme psychological pressure to blackmail the two girls into sex. This meets the criteria of rape as the vulnerable women are coerced and forced to accept the sexual arrangement so that the procedure will proceed.

While the physical act is not shown, we see the outcome in one long take with the bathing women’s crying, pain-stricken faces. Shortly thereafter, Otilia composes herself and heads out to make an appearance at her mother in laws birthday party. Her in laws are members of the well-to-do nomenklatura and are revealed to be either ignorant or uncaring regarding the difficulties and hardships of life for most Romanians. Shortly after arriving they ask about Otilia’s parents, where she responds,

My father is in the military and my mother is retired on disability. They worked together when they were younger.

One responds patronisingly,

Simple folk often have better sense than the educated.

Later, after toasting and feasting on an exquisite dinner, one dinner party participant rails against the alleged privileges of youth,

 

Look at today’s youngsters, it’s all handed to them on a plate, dorms, state aid, Mum and Dad spoon feeding them.

and,

Kids today must learn that life is hard, that no one will coddle them. They’d send me out to graze the cow and I’d do my homework by lamplight.

This long dinner party scene features authentic dialogue and throws inequality into sharp refrain. In subtle ways, it sharply juxtaposes an unequal society. There is an easy comparison to the dingy student accommodation, the brutal, demoralising experience she just had to the tastefully decorated apartment and lavish birthday dinner party. The dinner party scene ran to nearly 8 minutes across one take and has been described by one critic as an “undisputable tour de force”.[5] It took 20 attempts and 500 meters of filming material to capture.

Otilia heads back to the hotel where she finds that the abortion has been successful and begins to clean up. In the infamous third bathroom scene we are forced to endure an unbearable image as Mungiu forces upon the audience a jarring still image of the aborted foetus in a scene which runs for 14 seconds. Compared to the infantile Gabita, Otilia is much more mature and capable of dealing with the aftermath of the abortion and disposing of all the evidence to hide this terrible secret.

The film ends simply at an austere dimly lit restaurant table, with the anticlimactic statement: “Lets never speak about it anymore”. Otilia pensively looks out the restaurant window directly into the camera. It is not clear if she is looking at the viewer, or some third party who has followed her nighttime wandering and is aware of her illegal act.

The film is an intense experience excoriating the policy of banned abortions in Ceausescu’s Romania in its own variant of Stalinism that was “peculiarly vicious and repressive”. [6] It highlights the debilitating experience of women in Romania under decree 770 of 1966 which criminalised contraception and banned abortion for all women under 40 with less than four children. The program was ramped up in 1973 to arrest declining birthrates as abortion was seriously punished with many doctors and abortionists labelled serial killers arrested, tortured or imprisoned.[7] The policy is less known, yet comparable to the Maoist infamous one child policy. It was so widely despised, that In 1990 one year after Ceausescu was deposed, ‘the reviled abortion decree was immediately rescinded’.[8]

The puzzling roots of Ceausescu’s natal policies that impacted so many women can only be understood by examining Trotsky’s writings from the late 1930s. The ban on abortion in Romania would not be possible without the ban on abortions first in the Stalinist USSR. In analysing the attack on the right to abortion in the USSR in the late 1930s, Trotsky wrote, in the Revolution Betrayed, on the immediate period after the Bolshevik seizure of power:

 

The revolutionary power gave women the right to abortion, which in conditions of want and family distress, is one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights.

However:

The state makes a sharp change of course, and takes the road of prohibition with abortion punishable with imprisonment. This foul police interference in what is to every woman the most intimate sphere of life is indistinguishable from relations in Capitalist countries.

The oppression of women was concomitant with the Stalinist counterrevolution from above which wound back and undid many progressive policies implemented by Lenin’s Bolsheviks. The ban on abortion proceeded à la the repudiation of the right of countries to self-determination, a distasteful chapter of history masterfully examined in Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle.  

Ceausescu’s pro natal policies were the logical outgrowth of socialism in one country, turning women into broodmares to raise the birth rate was an enfeebled attempt to lift economic indicators using realpolitik, rather than the program of world social revolution. This was the policy of Stalinism in the Postwar period with the dissolution of the Comintern and the signing of the Potsdam Agreement.

 

Knowingly or not, Christian Mungui insightfully brings this history and these issues to the fore. 4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days is well worth seeing while it's available. The minimalist film throws this entire tawdry experience into sharp refrain.

 

NOTES

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[1] Nasta, Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema : The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. 181

[2] Nasta, Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema : The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. 187

[3] Nasta, Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema : The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. 187

[4] Pop, Doru. 2021. Romanian Cinema : Thinking Outside the Screen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 87

[5]   Nasta, Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema : The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. 194

[6] Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar : A History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin Press. 431

[7] Nasta, Dominique. 2013. Contemporary Romanian Cinema : The History of an Unexpected Miracle. London: Wallflower Press. 187

[8] Stan, Lavinia, and Diane Vancea, eds. 2024. Post-Communist Progress and Stagnation at 35 : The Case of Romania. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 12

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Postcards from Utopia: An ironic look at capitalist restoration in Romania

“A nostalgic supercut of gloriously kitsch media relics, this acerbic film wittily brings out bald-faced narratives around money and success. Behind the blunt messaging of television adverts, filmmaker Radu Jude and philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz find pernicious political messages at play.” - Mubi 

Postcards from Utopia by Radu Jude 

By Owen Hsieh 

Postcards from Utopia

Directed by Radu Jude and Christian Ferencz-Flatz

Runtime: 70 minutes, 2024

 

Postcards from Utopia is a feature-length montage comprised entirely of advertisements from Romania in the 1990s, selected from a period following capitalist restoration across the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. The pseudo-documentary is the product of the sardonic and sarcastic wit of prolific Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, in partnership with critical theory scholar Ferencz-Flatz. 

The film is quite entertaining as the curated selections of advertisements are either quite funny, lyrical or kitsch. Radu highlights many original, novel concepts in this curated set of advertisements within a largely self-referential, distinctly Romanian, advertising culture. The advertisements are novel and creative, a product of circumstances that restricted access from ordinary sources of imitation and pastiche. 

Generally speaking, the advertising industry recycles and reuses creative concepts, creating familiarity and nostalgia, or by the strategy of imitating successful concepts from competitors, however the Romanian advertising industry has been deprived of these influences and been forced to go its own way – hence their originality. 

Simultaneously, it is evoking a defining moment in history; capitalist restoration in Romania and its later journey to EU membership. 

The advertisements trace changes in the Romanian economy during the 1990s with the implementation of “shock therapy” to break up the remnants of planned economy and privatise former state owned assets. With a corresponding shift from an economic orientation centered on heavy industry, to the burgeoning production of consumer goods. 

Commercials depicting the virtues of privatisation

The montage shows an idealised self in the national consciousness of Romania, and a sense of optimism with consumers portrayed purchasing luxury food and drinks, home appliances, automobiles etcetera. 

Commercial depicting the new good life in a capitalist Romania.

This is due to capitalism’s need to development of a range of artificial wants and needs. As the art critic John Berger wrote, 

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible. This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.  [1]

Berger added,

Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal it proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more. This more, it proposes, will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money. [2] 

The newly celebrated medium of advertising was seen to be particularly exciting and ‘intoxicating’ as the corporate images were associated with an affluent western lifestyle and its freedoms: 

Publicity is usually explained and justified as a competitive medium which ultimately the public (the consumer) and the most efficient manufacturers - and thus the national economy, it is closely related to certain ideas about freedom: freedom of choice for the purchaser: freedom of enterprise for the manufacturer. The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of ’The Free World.’ 

For many in Eastern Europe such images in the West sum up what they in the East lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free choice. [3] 

Despite this heady optimism, the restoration of capitalism inaugurated a catastrophic and precipitous decline in living standards within Romania: 

Initially, the Bulgarian and Romanian post communists tried to keep domestic industries afloat with state subsidies. When the burden on the state budget became too great, they privatized the industries, mostly by means of so-called manager buyouts. This entailed farming out or auctioning off businesses to their own executives. The practice created warped incentives by making it worthwhile to intentionally mismanage or break up state enterprises in order to buy them cheaply. The bidding process, moreover, was frequently distorted by nepotism and bribery. In the end, the state attained much smaller revenues from privatization than projected, and industrial production dropped, causing tax revenues to fall again. 

Romania and Bulgaria responded by printing more money. By the late nineties, they were suffering another period of crippling inflation. [4] 

Through this process inequality and poverty rates rose steeply, with millions in Romania and across Eastern Europe living below the poverty line. Further compounding this process, Romania was particularly vulnerable to adverse material conditions due to the debilitating experience of decades of Stalinism: 

Romanian society, had suffered such oppression under the neo-Stalinist Ceausescu regime that its subsequent recovery from collective trauma left little strength and few resources to build a resilient market economy.[5] 

Knowing this essential context tinges the somewhat comic selection of advertisements with a tragic air. Ultimately, the outcome was the unfortunate confirmation of a process earlier identified by Leon Trotsky. 

After calling for a political revolution to oust the Stalinist and defend the gains of the October revolution, Trotsky prophetically noted the likely outcome in the absence of a political revolution, 

Against the mistaken idea that from the present Soviet regime only a transition to socialism is possible. In reality a backslide to capitalism is wholly possible. [6]

Trotsky explicitly pointed to the fate of the Soviet Union should capitalism be restored,

A collapse of the Soviet regime would lead inevitably to the collapse of the planned economy, and thus the abolition of state property… The fall of the present bureaucratic dictatorship, if it were not replaced by a new socialist power, would thus mean a return to capitalist relations with a catastrophic decline of industry and culture. [7] 

Radu summarised some of his thoughts on this national experience recently on the Klassiki podcast: 

‘The position of Romania, from a historical point of view, is very particular, it’s a country who just got out of a terrible communist dictatorship, in a long transition to a neoliberal capitalism with no social protection, or very little, and almost getting back to fascism again,[8] we just avoided in the new elections, but still the tendency is still there.’ [9] 

To conclude, this remarkable concept film is the product of Radu’s playful, creative and incisive vision. He is one of the most interesting contemporary directors and undoubtedly the preeminent representative of the second generation of directors in Romanian New Wave Cinema.

 

Previous noteworthy films of his include: 

Caricaturana (2021): a remarkable short film which was based on the unrealised vision of Soviet director Eisenstein. It featured satirical lithographs by 19th-century French artist Honoré-Victorin Daumier, and culminated in a critique of tabloid journalism. 

I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018): which dealt with the legacy of the holocaust in Romania in very sensitive, acerbic manner. This is part of a triptych of films dealing with the holocaust in Romania. 

Radu Jude is, in this authors opinion, one of the most interesting contemporary directors practising today. 

Postcards from Utopia is currently streaming via Mubi.com https://mubi.com

 

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[1] John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1990, Penguin Books, pp. 154

[2] Ibid, pp. 131

[3] Ibid, pp. 130-131

[4] Philip Ther, Europe since 1989, 2017, Princeton University Press, pp. 97

[5] Ibid, pp. 112

[6] Leon Trotsky, the Revolution Betrayed, 1937, Dover Publications (2004), pp. 193

[7] Ibid, pp. 190

[8] Romania was plagued by the fascist Iron Guard movement during World War II.

[9] Radu Jude, From Rossellini to Dracula, 2025, the Klassiki Podcast, 5:30-6:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBkTSJnNfoc

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