Way I Spent the End of the World (Cum mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii),The

A Romanian schoolgirl finds her life forever changed when she accidentally knocks over a bust of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in director Catalin Mitulescu's tragic-comic coming-of-age tale. The year is 1989, and the suffocating grip of despot Ceausescu is slowly loosening as the result of rising civil unrest. After pretty Eva (Dorothea Petrie) and her rebellious boyfriend Alex (Ionut Becheru) inadvertently send a statue of Ceausescu tumbling to the ground, she is exiled to a bleak reformatory institution while he is let off with a stern warning due to his father's strong Communist party ties. It is at her new school that Eva makes the acquaintance of the disarmingly disobedient Andrei (Cristian Vararu), a boy whose dissident parents are nowhere to be found. As Andrei and Eva hatch a daring plan to swim to freedom across the Danube, Eva's deeply embittered seven-year-old brother Lalalilu (Timotei Duma) conspires with his two best friends (Marius Stan and Marian Stoica) to assassinate the notoriously brutal Ceausescu during a national celebration in which the three youngsters are set to sing in a children's choir.