<<Doha, Qatar – 11 March, 2015: In the concluding master-class at Qumra, the new industry event by the Doha Film Institute, Qumra Master Cristian Mungiu, a Palm d’Or winner, advised young filmmakers to challenge and inundate themselves with questions to arrive at the precise tools for filmmaking.
“Ask why you are making the film, for whom you are making it,” said Mr. Mungiu. “Ask if the film matters to them and what kind of film you want to make. Unless you know the answers to these questions, you cannot advance. And once you have found the answers, you will find the precise tools to make the right filmmaking decision.”[…]
At the session moderated by Jean-Michel Frodon, journalist and critic, Mr. Mungiu took the audience through his personal journey of watching films by the dozen on VCR, screening them for his friends and eventually finding himself in cinema, later in life, after the collapse of the Communist government in Romania. “That was a ‘meet your fate’ moment,” he said, when he resigned his job in the media, and moved to Bucharest to study film.
Mr. Mungiu said that growing up in Romania, the priority as a young man was to get into college for a shorter period of compulsory military service than to dream of being a filmmaker as the only film school was predominantly catering to the elite.
The film school he eventually attended, said Mr. Mungiu, “was useful but not systematic. We learnt about films without watching them because the school didn’t have them. The important thing, I learnt, was to read a lot and understand what others before us did.”>>