Longer still, Nemescu’s CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’ (2007) is a more traditional Eastern European social farce, a kind of my-sour-little-village picaresque centered on a destitute village in the muddy Carpathian basin during the Kosovo war — the only sign of which in these self-centered lives is a NATO train carrying US Marines and munitions, which the town happily waylays, sniffing for profit. As Nemescu’s title says, America is both the promised land and the object of socio-economic derision (“Fuck Bill Clinton!” is the crowning moment of defiance), personified by Armand Assante as a get-it-done officer faced with the recalcitrance and carefree self-service of the Romanian trod-upon. Razvan Vasilescu, again, is the catalyst for the chaos, which mixes in striking workers and defensive bureaucrats but ultimately focuses on village girls looking for handsome American husbands and a one-way ticket out of Dodge. Climaxing with the carnage of a heartbreaking riot, Nemescu’s epic comedy leaves nothing out — its own irony, because it’s an unfinished film, left dangling after its director’s demise. See it now before Harvey Weinstein buys it and takes out the scissors.

It might say something about the prickly Romanian sensibility that few films in the series are of orthodox feature-film length — if they’re not ambitiously long, they’re featurettes and long shorts, all the less convenient to box into categories. Nemescu’s 40-minute “MARINELA FROM P7” (2006) begins as a Bucharest Los olvidados before devolving into a street kid’s coming-of-age experience with a young hooker; the filmmaker, it seems, had an unquenched thirst for Elvis impersonators and electrically charged women. Puiu’s “CIGARETTES AND COFFEE” (2004) is a more rigorous and astute pas de deux between a near-retiree being shut out of the industrial system and a young, rich bureaucrat trying, diffidently, to lend a hand. Mitulescu’s “TRAFFIC” (2004) limns the gap between a yuppie’s career demands and the life flowing around him as he gets stuck in traffic and tries to manage the world on his car cell. Still, Radu Jude’s “THE TUBE WITH A HAT” (2006), involving a father, a son, a broken TV and a stretch of uncooperative countryside, stands out thanks to its almost Kiarostamian purity.

Mitulescu’s feature debut, THE WAY I SPENT THE END OF WORLD (2006), is of ordinary length and scale, and it might be the sweetest surprise, thanks both to watchful lead Dorotheea Petre (a prize at Cannes) and Mitulescu’s conception of her character: a tempestuous, rebellious high-schooler dissatisfied with her smitten boyfriend and fed up with the Ceausescu reign. She contemplates escape — but to where? Something of a generational touchstone in Romania, Mitulescu’s movie climaxes with the revolution-is-being-televised events of December 1989, a thoroughly unsentimental happy ending that comes with its own kind of disappointing blowback, one felt across the country.