Sthorzina
2014 · 20m · Romania
Directed by Dan Radu Mihai
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Two boys — one on the Romanian side of the Danube, one on the Serbian side — exchange secret objects by remote-controlled boat until one of them finds a gun.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A border-crossing coming-of-age story that *could* be maudlin European art-film territory, but the gun arrest—the premise twist—actually earns its tonal shift rather than just collapsing into it; Mihai refuses the easy melancholy.
The remote-controlled boat as formal device—mediating distance, desire, and eventually trauma across a geopolitical boundary—sits in clear dialogue with Eastern European cinema's tradition of using landscape and objects as moral registers; the film's restraint is its rigor.
The decision to keep both boys' faces equally obscured and at equal remove until the gun appears—a sound design choice that holds the Danube as the true protagonist—transforms what could've been sentimental into something genuinely unsettling on a micro-budget.