A picture-perfect wedding goes horribly awry when the groom’s mistress crashes the festivities, sending the bride-to-be into a tailspin — and toward her ultimate redemption — in “3 Days in September,” the latest from veteran Romanian director and producer Tudor Giurgiu (“Freedom”).
The film, which opens the 25th Transilvania Intl. Film Festival, stars Andreea Vasile as Bianca, a 40-year-old bride whose betrothal to Victor (Emilian Oprea) is upended by revelations that he’s been sleeping with his co-worker. With not only her wedding but her plans for the future now in question, Bianca flees the scene — and is quickly swept up in a rollicking, night-of-the-soul odyssey around a faded resort town.
Marked by caustic humor and biting comedy — and built around an audacious, 65-minute single take — “3 Days in September” is a departure for Giurgiu, who is also the TIFF founder and president.
His last film, the docudrama “The Spruce Forest,” released last year, was based on the 1941 massacre of up to 200 civilians by Soviet border troops as they attempted to cross into Romania. His previous work of fiction, “Freedom” (2023), is a tense dramatic thriller set during Romania’s 1989 revolution that follows armed clashes after an attack on a police station. (In the interim between the two productions, he made the documentary “Nasty,” a freewheeling portrait of the ’70s Romanian tennis bad boy Ilie Năstase, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024.)
Following such weighty subject matter, Giurgiu was, by his own admission, ready for a change of pace, although he says he was “strongly motivated” to move in a different direction after hearing from his toughest critic: his eldest son.
“‘We all know you’re just into communism and history,’” the director recalls the 19-year-old telling him. “‘Gen Z wants different stuff. Give us something else.’”
What that “something” might be, however, proved elusive. For some time, Giurgiu had been toying with the idea of a film about a disastrous wedding “where everything collapses and goes wrong.” He was inspired, too, by his compatriot Radu Jude, a prolific provocateur who restlessly experiments with themes and formats — his recent feature, “Kontinental ’25,” was shot entirely on an iPhone — working at a breakneck pace, often with budgets that would make the average arthouse filmmaker balk.
“You can really have fun doing those films in a shorter time, and then you move to another project,” says Giurgiu. “And then I thought, ‘Why not? Let’s do something with this spirit in mind.’”
Around the same time, a friend called Giurgiu with a proposal to make his next film at a hotel the friend had recently opened in the Black Sea resort town of Eforie Sud. Giurgiu not only jumped at the idea of shooting there but saw it “as an occasion to work with new people,” proposing a collaboration where the key creatives — from the director and DoP to the production and costume designers — had never worked together before. Thus, the Arome Film Creative Camp was born.
Director, producer and Transilvania Film Festival founder Tudor Giurgiu
Courtesy Transilvania Film Festival
The production would have a tight timeline, shooting over the course of a frenetic week last September. There was only one problem. “We had a concept, but we didn’t have a story,” Giurgiu says.
It was Transilvania Film Festival artistic director Mihai Chirilov who he credits with “finding the right canvas, the right story structure” for “3 Days in September.” Stressing the impossibility of filming and editing an entire feature over the course of one week, he proposed a movie built around a single-take centerpiece, a choice that was inspired by Chilean filmmaker Matías Bize’s 2003 drama “Saturday.”
After receiving Bize’s blessing, Giurgiu and his collaborators got to work, drafting the script in one month and making regular trips to Eforie Sud to map out Bianca’s journey around the seaside town. The extended scene that makes up the bulk of the film, says Giurgiu, required “a lot of choreography” from cast and crew alike. “Beside your craft, beside the work with the DoP, we had to do a lot of preparation with the actors,” he says. “We didn’t improvise. Everything had to be like clockwork.”
That included the performance of lead actress Vasile, who is also the director’s wife — a fact that Giurgiu says helped the duo find its way through the demanding, single-take scene.
“The acting had to be very precise,” he says. “We talked a lot, and she was so stressed. But without her carrying the tension, the emotion throughout the 65-minute single take — without those things, it would have just been like a technical achievement. It has to have a meaning, and this kind of emotion has to be conveyed by the actors.”
“3 Days in September” arrives in Cluj following its world premiere at the Intl. Film Festival Rotterdam. It was written by Giurgiu, Conrad Mericoffer and Radu Grigore and produced by Giurgiu and Mirel Olaru for Point Film. Cinematography was done by first-time DoP Alexandru Dorobanțu, with the cast alongside stars Vasile and Oprea rounded out by Conrad Mericoffer, Adela Popescu and Mirela Zeța.
Up next for Giurgiu is a documentary about legendary Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci, which will reunite him with the creative team behind “Nasty.” Also in the works is a period piece about the unknown life of a man he describes as “the Romanian Nijinsky,” Dumitru “Trixy” Checais, who was the leading figure in Romania’s ballet scene in the 1940s but was later imprisoned by communist authorities.
Giurgiu says the film will tell the story of the dancer’s life while “also mirroring the destiny of this country,” adding: “It’s mostly a story about identity, with the backdrop of a very complicated period in the history of Romania.”
The Transilvania Intl. Film Festival runs June 12 – 21.