Three Kilometres to the End of the World [Trei kilometri până la capătul lumii)] **** (2024, Ciprian Chiujdea, Bogdan Dumitrache, Laura Vasiliu, Valeriu Andriuță, Adrian Titieni) – Classic Movie Review 13,731

The 2024 Romanian drama film Three Kilometres to the End of the World stars Ciprian Chiujdea as gay teenager Adi, brutally attacked at night by two other boys on the street.

Co-writer/ director Emanuel Pârvu’s 2024 Romanian drama film Three Kilometres to the End of the World [Trei kilometri până la capătul lumii)] stars Ciprian Chiujdea as gay teenager Adi.

Ciprian Chiujdea stars as Adi, a 17-year-old gay teenager, is spending the summer in his home village in the Romanian Danube Delta. He is brutally attacked at night by two other boys on the street, who have seen him kissing a boy tourist. He staggers home to his ghastly repressive parents, who are shocked, doubly so because they didn’t know he was gay and he is in a dreadful physical mess, and prove utterly useless to help him, with the rest of the locals nasty and homophobic. The police go through the motions. There is an investigation. The law finds out who did it. But no one seems to dare file a complaint in case it rebounds badly on them. With a complaint, the case is closed. Adi has one person on his side, his friend Ilinca (Ingrid Micu-Berescu).

Three Kilometres to the End of the World chilling, incisive, and brilliantly done in naturalistic, realistic style, with some tasty credible acting too under quite tricky circumstances. It’s quite a hard watch, doomy and harrowing even though the assault is not shown, but seriously rewarding. Among other subtleties, the tourist is not actually shown as a character in the story, leaving all the focus on the ghastly parents (played by Bogdan Dumitrache and Laura Vasiliu), the smug and vaguely corrupt local Police Chief (Valeriu Andriuță), and the equally ghastly local Priest (Adrian Titieni), who gives a masterclass in smugness. In a film that’s not about the acting at all, these actors give very significant performances, so real it hurts.

Adi gets sidelined and disappears even if it is his story, but reappears when needed, and especially at the climax. In one way, Adi is not the main character in his own story, the crappy grown-ups are, old enough to know better, much, much better.

Adi’s age is significant to the story because he is still legally a child, so the child welfare authorities can intervene, well they could try. Good luck with that then.

[Spoiler alert] I’m going to give you hope and encouragement since events in a film called Three Kilometres to the End of the World are so depressing and disturbing. Adi lives to tell the tale and get the hell out of Dodge. It’s a near thing though. Knife-edge.

The Romanian Danube Delta looks gorgeous, and we get plenty of chances to see it in a film of long shots soaking up the environment, but remind me not to go there for my vacation. The locals don’t seem very friendly.

Emanuel Pârvu writes the screenplay with the film’s producer Miruna Berescu.

It was shot in September and October 2023 in the Danube Delta, in the Sfântu Gheorghe branch and the Dunavăț canal.

It premiered on 17 May 2024  at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Queer Palm.

Independența Film distributed the film in Romania on 11 October 2024.

Cast: Ciprian Chiujdea, Bogdan Dumitrache, Laura Vasiliu, Valeriu Andriuță, Adrian Titieni, Ingrid Micu-Berescu, Alina Berzunțeanu, Richard Bovnoczki, Vlad Ionut Popescu.

Duration: 105 minutes.

Production: FamArt Production, Romanian Film Centre, Publicis Groupe Media Bucharest, MMS Communications, House of Media.

Emanuel Pârvu is not gay and wanted Adi to be played by a gay actor. The actor looks a bit mature for the role (and has to play it throughout hidden in mashed-up face make-up), but that might be partly because the actress playing the mother looks rather young,

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,731

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