Radu Mihaileanu

Origins and early life

Radu Mihaileanu was born in Bucharest on 23 April 1958, the son of Mordechaï Buchman, a Jewish communist journalist whom the Nazis deported to a labour camp; he escaped, changed his identity, and it was under his new name of Ion Mihaileanu that he later wrote for the Romanian cinema. The son grew up under Ceausescu, ran a theatre company, and fled the dictatorship in 1980; he went first to Israel and then settled in France, where he studied at the national film school and worked as an editor and assistant director.

Work and career

His first feature, Trahir, in 1993, followed a dissident Romanian poet under Stalinism. His second made his name: Train de vie, in 1998, imagines a shtetl that builds a fake deportation train and drives itself east to escape the Nazis, a comedy about the Holocaust released the same year as Benigni's Life Is Beautiful and awarded at Venice and at Sundance. Va, vis et deviens, in 2005, follows an Ethiopian Christian boy passed off as a Jew to be airlifted to Israel in Operation Moses and forced to live a lie among the people who took him in; it won the César for best original screenplay.

He went on to make Le Concert and La Source des femmes. His subject, across all of it, is people who survive by inventing an identity, and what that invention costs them.