When Movies Follow The Storm.(Arts)

Byline: Jessica Au and Ginanne Brownell; With Silvia Spring in Nairobi

In the recently traumatized societies of Romania, Thailand and Nigeria, upheaval is inspiring a new wave of film.

United States Marine Capt. Doug Jones is in a hurry. It's the height of the war in Kosovo, and he's in charge of transporting supplies to NATO forces bombing targets in Yugoslavia. When the train on which he and his troops are traveling comes to a standstill in the tiny Romanian town of Capalnita, he jumps out to investigate. Here Jones encounters the obstacle blocking their way: the local station manager, Doriaru, who refuses to let the train through without the correct customs papers. While the buck gets passed from ministry to ministry, the villagers of Capalnita rejoice at the prospect of having American soldiers stranded on their soil. His frustration mounting, Jones pulls out an atlas to decipher exactly where they are. A flunky points to a crease in the page. "So we are stuck in a fold in the map in the middle of Romania," cries Jones, temples pulsating. "How much more stuck [can] we be?"

The train won't budge, but the film that this scene opens, the Kafkaesque Romanian comedy "California Dreamin'," is off and running. It won this year's Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes, which recognizes up-and-coming talent, and the Audience Award at the Brussels Film Festival. Sadly, the director, Cristian Nemescu, died in a car crash in August 2006 and never got to witness the success of his movie debut -- or of his country's burgeoning film industry. In addition to Nemescu's posthumous hit, Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," about a woman trying to arrange an illegal abortion before the fall of communism, scooped the Palme d'Or at Cannes. They follow in the footsteps of several other Romanian films that earned kudos in the last few years: "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu" also won Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes in 2005, "The Way I Spent the End of the World" was awarded Un Certain Regard for best actress at Cannes in 2006, "12:08 East of Bucharest" won the best-film award in Copenhagen last year and "The Paper Will Be Blue" won Special Mention of the Jury at last year's Sarajevo Film Festival.

Romania is not the only postcoup society undergoing a filmmaking boom. Nigeria -- home of "Nollywood," the third largest producer of low-budget, mass-market films, after the United States and India -- is fast gaining a reputation for quality feature filmmaking, thanks to the recent international success of home grown films like "Irapada," which follows a young building contractor whose foster mother pressures him to perform a traditional redemption rite, and "Ezra," about the plight of child soldiers in Sierra Leone. And in Thailand, experimental filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang may be battling censorship laws at home, but they are carving out a name for themselves overseas with films like "Ploy" and "Syndromes and a Century." These countries all share a common characteristic: recent upheavals have fired the creative minds of their filmmakers.

It helps that these nations are intriguing precisely because of their ongoing traumas. Romania just joined the European Union in January, yet it still bears the scars of dictatorship nearly two decades after the summary execution of communist strongman Nicolae Ceausescu. Nigeria is struggling with a shaky democracy eight years after ending corrupt military rule. And since Thailand's September 2006 coup, that country has been ruled by putschists who embrace their king's conservative vision of modern Thailand as a 19th-century agrarian society. International appetite for inside glimpses of these nations has helped fuel their filmmaking industries, in much the same way that postrevolutionary Iranian films won audiences -- and critical acclaim -- in the late 1990s. "When you get considerable social change or unrest, that's when people start looking for analysis and answers -- and filmmakers are part of this process," says Sandra Hebron, the artistic director of the London Film Festival. And festival programmers are always on the hunt for new, far-flung talent -- or the next trendy film-producing nation. "Once one or two filmmakers make a film around the same time ...