Oana Pellea

Her laughter is warm, hearty, contagious. When she talks about a film in the competition, it is often accompanied by a questioning smile. As a member of the international jury at Cluj, she embodies in her acting experience a broad knowledge of world theatre and cinema. Since she speaks four languages fluently, she serves as an ersatz translator during jury meetings. She is so off-hand in her dealings with staff and public that I have to remind myself that Oana Pellea (photo courtesy Dragos Cristescu) is one of Romania’s most distinguished actresses.

        One day, during a lunch break, I ventured an opinion about a favorite Romanian feature film: Alexandru Tatos’s Anastasia Passed Gently By (1979), a subtle adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone to everyday reality in Romania. Her face lit up in a smile. »I worked with Alexandru on his last film, Who Is Right? (1990), just before he died. He liked themes of solitude and reflection. My father felt he contributed a great deal to Romanian theatre and cinema. We miss him.« When I told her that I remembered her father too ­ in Sergiu Nicolaescu’s The Dacians (1966) ­ she was particularly pleased. Amza Pellea (1931-1983), who died too young, was a great stage and screen personality whose epic roles set in ancient times literally made him an institution in Romania. »Did you know there’s an ‘Amza Pellea’ Theatre Festival in Craiova, the cultural capital of Oltenia?« Later, at the airport, I wasn’t at all surprised when an elderly gentleman, a fan of her father’s, offered to carry her bag. Oana has followed admirably in Amza’s footsteps ­ to date, she has played 25 major roles on the stage, plus 15 roles on the screen, and she has a cupboard full of awards to show for it. She has interpreted nearly all the major roles suited to her talents on the stage: Masha in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Veta in Caragiale’s A Stormy Night, Drusilla in Albert Camus’s Caligula, Maria in Büchner’s Woyzeck, the Maid in Mihai Maniutiu’s Joan of Arc ­ File Pages from the original trial records. Shakespeare has become a sort of private domain: she has played the Queen in Richard II, Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Perdita in A Winter Tale, Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, for which role she received a national UNITER Award in 2001.

        With these plays ­ and one of her own: Je m’en vais, a self-styled »théâtre clownesque« produced together with Mihai Sandu 6shy; she has toured Europe. As for her best known screen role, the one that won her an armful of international awards, it’s Stere Gulea’s The State of Things (1995) in which she plays a nurse who, in December 1989, witnesses the murder of young students and refuses to cooperate with the secret police to cover up the crime ­ even at the cost of humiliation and imprisonment on a trumped-up charge.

Ronald Holloway