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Facets begins "The Cinema of Lucian Pintilie" Friday and continues its retrospective through May 13. Like novelist, essayist and critic Milan Kundera, the chronicler of a dear, departed Czechoslovakia, Romanian-born Pintilie fled his homeland. Unlike Kundera, he eventually returned, after communism and some of its more heinous proponents fell.

Facets hosts a revival of the films of Romanian director Lucian Pintilie - chicagotribune.com, Milan Kundera,

His cinematic work across five decades is the cry of outrage, shot through with gallows humor. Very little in the Romanian new wave, beginning with the 2007 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or winner, Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," would have been possible without Pintilie and his films.

Those fortunate enough to see Pintilie's mind-blowing stagings of "The Seagull" and "Tartuffe" at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, during the years when Pintilie's fellow Romanian emigre, Liviu Ciulei, ran the place, were forever changed by the experience.

Pintilie's films are intense and nerve-jangled, sometimes dealing in period stories or literary adaptations (easier to get by the censors), sometimes straight from contemporary landscapes, harsh and alive. The director has described his adolescence as "alcoholic and apolitical." Then he grew up, and politics could no longer be ignored. Pintilie's Romania is a place beyond cynicism, full of party-liners and injustice and little hope of honest repentance for anything. Yet the world and the life forces in his films spin forward, to paraphrase Tony Kushner. Life may be a blinkered mess, but the impulse to seize it, according to Pintilie, has a way of outrunning the oppressors.

"Reenactment" (1969), 7 p.m Friday, 7 p.m. May 11; 5:30 p.m. May 13

"Niki and Flo" (2003), 9:15 p.m. Friday, 7 p.m. Wednesday, 9 p.m. May 11, 1 p.m. May 13

"The Oak" (1992), 3, 7 p.m. Saturday

"An Unforgettable Summer" (1994), 5, 9 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. May 12

"Sunday at 6" (1965), 1, 5 p.m. Sunday

"Too Late" (1996), 3, 7 p.m. Sunday

"Carnival Scenes" (1979), 7 p.m. Monday, Thursday, 7:30 p.m. May 13

"Ward 6" (1973), 7 p.m. Tuesday, 9:15 p.m. Wednesday

"Next Stop, Paradise" (1998), 9 p.m. Tuesday, 5 p.m. May 12

"The Afternoon of a Torturer" (2001) and "Tertium Non Datur" (2005), 7 and 9:15 p.m. May 12, 3:15 p.m. May 13.