Marilena from P7 (2006)

Interesting facts

Marilena from P7 is a medium-length Romanian film, directed by Cristian Nemescu. First released in 2006, it was also nominated the same year for the Semaine de la critique section of the 59th Cannes Film Festival.

Production

The film's idea resulted from a small scale exercise between Nemescu and Liviu Marghidan when they were in university in 2003. The original idea belonged to Cătălin Mitulescu and Andreei Vălean; the only part of the original story that was kept is that of a group of boys trying to steal a trolleybus in order to get to some prostitutes.

Initially the film was planned as a short fiction, the project evolving during 2005. At the time, Nemescu also had planned what would later become the feature film California Dreamin', impossible to film at that moment, deciding that Marilena from P7 could prove a useful exercise for both director and actors.

Filming also took place in 2005, near the marketplace of the Bucharest neighborhood Rahova. The chosen area raised a few difficulties related to safety. However, the production benefited from its picturesque view, rendering the scenography and the original music unnecessary. The omnipresent manele also found their way into the movie, as background music.

In order for the story to go as it should, we needed a 'low-income' area. At the same time, the place also needed to be visually pleasant, and to meet our needs from the technical point of view – meaning it should be large enough for a trolleybus to fit in, and it should also look plausible. For almost a full week we looked around the whole Bucharest.

For a long period of time the project was entitled Trolley Blues; Cristian Nemescu gave up this title, worrying that there might be a large discrepancy between the equivocal name and the actual, very direct content of the movie.

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