4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 days A painstaking, gritty authenticity.

To put it in Fashion Week lingo, Romanian cinema is the new black. Just like the Iranian, Asian, German, Czech and French new waves that preceded it, the flood of exciting Romanian films and filmmakers currently making a splash on the international festival and arthouse circuit has sent critics into paroxysms of delight and confusion. Do Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), Cristo Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu) and Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest) really signal the emergence of an official Romanian nouvelle vague? Or are they just a temporary blip on the cinephile radar screen until the Next Big Thing (Sri Lankan, Bulgarian, Finnish, whatever) materializes?

According to Romanian film critic Alex Leo Serban, "There are no "waves,' just individuals." Puiu himself vociferously denied the existence of any such movement ("There is not, not, not, not, not a Romanian new wave") in a January New York Times article. But it's only natural for trend-spotters to jump on a perceived bandwagon.

What helped unite this new breed of directors, like the 1960s Czech filmmakers who grappled with their newfound freedom during the Prague Spring, is the revolution of 1989. They were reacting to the bogus and inane movies produced during the communist era of Nicolae Ceausescu. The hunger for "real" stories about everyday lives was palpable, and these "neo-neorealists" explored formerly taboo subjects that wouldn't have been possible less than a generation earlier.

Yet some unmistakable formal characteristics link these Romanian filmmakers as well. Screen naturalism is taken to remarkable levels of painstaking, gritty authenticity. With their long, uninterrupted takes, unobtrusive camerawork and seemingly caught-on-the-fly dialogue, the new Romanian films seem more like cinema verite than conventionally scripted drama. It's only afterwards that you realize just how artful and purposeful this "casual" approach is, and how it pays extraordinary dividends in terms of verisimilitude.

The Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque is presenting a program culled from Romania's cinematic boomlet. Several of the titles screening in the "Newest Wave" series, including Stuff and Dough (May 8 and 9) and Occident (May 3 and 4), Puiu and Mungiu's directorial debuts, are Ohio premieres. One of the most entertaining and accessible of the never-before-seen-in-Cleveland movies is Catalin Mitulescu's The Way I Spent the End of the World (May 8 and 9), which views the last year of Ceausescu's reign through the eyes of a 7-year-old boy who decides to assassinate the dictator after his teenage sister is sent to a reformatory for accidentally breaking a statue of Ceausescu.

Another local premiere is California Dreamin' (Endless) (May 3 and 4), the only feature by Cristian Nemescu who died in a car accident while his film was in post-production. A dark comedy, helping to prove that Romanians do have a sense of humor despite their predilection for bleak subject matter, Endless tells the incredible true-life story of a Romanian bureaucrat who hijacked a NATO train loaded with American military and weapons headed for Kosovo in the 1990s.

The showcase also includes the better known 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (May 1 and 4) and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (May 11). Whether the recent influx of interesting films and directors from Romania truly constitutes a "new wave" or not is open to conjecture. Whatever you call it, there's no disputing that filmmakers like Mungiu and Puiu are helping to shine an often brilliant, sometimes painful light on a heretofore unexamined part of the globe.

ROMANIA: THE NEWEST WAVE: May 1-11 at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., 216-421-7450.