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Twenty years after the fall of the communism, Romanian villages have been greatly de-populated. Romanians, once forbidden to hold a passport, are now leaving the country on an average rate of several hundred thousand per year. The result is tragic and profound, with dramatic long-term consequences. Tens of thousands of children are left without proper supervision or education. The family concept, once a vital foundation of this once patriarchal society, is destroyed in the desperate rush for gold in the West. The children of migrants often become criminals themselves, therefore closing a vicious circle. This the plot of When I want to whistle, I whistle (Florin Serban, 2010), but also the philosophy behind Outbound (Bogdan George Apetri, 2011), the movie which closes stylistically the first decade of the New Romanian Cinema. Through an examination of a number of films that stay home or venture abroad, this chapter analyzes the failure of Great Expectations of immigration and the fall of the Western myth and resulting generalized sociological desperation, major themes of the New Romanian Cinema.

The chapter attempts to provide an analysis of Porumboiu's body of work in a way that goes beyond the notions of Realism that is usually discussed in relation to the New Romanian Cinema. Theories of visual and verbal representation are identified that seem to be central to several of his Porumboiu's films from Foucault's seminal discussion of Magritte through Barthes's analysis of the Panzani commercial, Gadamer's description of the differences between signs, images and symbols, to Mitchell's notion of metapicture. Two important issues are highlighted: the mediality of representations and their relation to the represented reality. The author contends that although these theoretical issues are clearly brought up in the stories and dialogues of the films, Porumboiu fails to make them an intrinsic part of his own filmic form of expression.

Over the last decade, films belonging to what has come to be known as the New Romanian Cinema (NRC) have received several important prizes at various international film festivals, most prominently at Cannes, and the NRC has been celebrated as the breakout star of European cinema. Although some attention has been given to the shared aesthetic values of NRC films, to this date, only a few scholarly texts have focused on analyzing thematic aspects such as the NRC's portrayal of life in Cold War Romania. This essay seeks to correct this omission by analyzing Cătălin Mitulescu's Cum mi-am petrecut sfarşitul lumii/The Way I Spent the End of the World (2006).This chapter addresses the themes of migration and escape but focuses on the lives of those who stayed in Romania during the final years of the Ceauşescu regime. Analysing the Romanian-French co-production, The Way I Spent the End of the World, Petrescu contrasts the sometimes nostalgic portrait of youth in communist Romania to the more wistful and less critical German brand of Ostalgie.