Romanian Capitalism on Screen examines contemporary Romanian cinema as a testimony to pivotal aspects of Romania's postsocialist economy and culture. It complements existing accounts of economic and cultural history by utilizing the perspective of socially engaged, high-quality cinema to provide enlightening insights into the country's emerging capitalist culture. Focusing on key feature films of the New Romanian Cinema, the monograph presents a methodological framework for analyzing cinematic texts as "histories of the present." It addresses the economic imagination of emerging entrepreneurial classes, the value of human life within neoliberal contexts, the struggles of the middle and working classes during periods of radical economic and social transformation, the mental mapping of globalization from a European periphery, and emigration as a form of economic revenge.Romanian Capitalism on Screen examines contemporary Romanian cinema as a testimony to pivotal aspects of Romania's postsocialist economy and culture. It complements existing accounts of economic and cultural history by utilizing the perspective of socially engaged, high-quality cinema to provide enlightening insights into the country's emerging capitalist culture. Focusing on key feature films of the New Romanian Cinema, the monograph presents a methodological framework for analyzing cinematic texts as "histories of the present." It addresses the economic imagination of emerging entrepreneurial classes, the value of human life within neoliberal contexts, the struggles of the middle and working classes during periods of radical economic and social transformation, the mental mapping of globalization from a European periphery, and emigration as a form of economic revenge.

"‘This is a study that disrupts the patronising view of Eastern Europe as only “catching up” – instead, it foregrounds the advantages of the peripheral vantage with its own capacity to narrate Europe’s contradictions back to its core. Romanian Capitalism on Film is not only a major contribution to film studies and cultural history. It is, in the deepest sense, a warning and an invitation: to read the screen as testimony, to recover small truths, and to reckon with the unfinished story of Europe’s essentialised “margins”.’" - Cornel Ban, Associate professor of international political economy, Copenhagen Business School