3 Days In September

Although best known for his documentaries, like Nasty (2024) and based-on-true events political thriller/documentary hybrids, including Why Me? (2015) and Libertate (2023), Tudor Giurgiu has touched some other topics and genres in his career, mostly comedies and relationship dramas. His feature-length debut Love Sick (2006) was one of the latter, and, with that, Giurgiu at least tried to tell a certain story from a female perspective.

With 3 Days in September (not to be confused with a number of films with the same title), he comes back to exactly the same idea, but further reinforced with a very particular and defined filmmaking style. Each of the days is filmed in a simulation of one take, with the first and the last serving as a short prologue and epilogue, leaving the bulk of the plot and proceedings for the second day and the second frame. Despite its festival premiere at Rotterdam, the film did not travel that much, but it was caught at Sarajevo’s In Focus programme.

Bianca (Andreea Vasile) and Victor (Emilian Oprea) are a couple of 40-year-old professionals about to get married in a coastal resort town slightly off-season. They are happy about it and are looking forward to their wedding trip, albeit they are having some troubles conceiving. However, the next day, just before the wedding itself, Victor’s former secretary and lover drops a bombshell – she is pregnant with his baby, so Bianca runs away in panic, willing to sabotage the whole ceremony paid by her overbearing mother, while trying to figure what to do on her own.

She boards a tourist road train and her adventure or journey of self-discovery begins. On it, she will get drunk in a bar over a period of one sad ballad, encounter a wise old woman who has to live through her own worst horror of solitude, crash another wedding, endure several screaming contests with her mother and her douchebag fiancé, be taken into a witches’ circle and fall for a guy in an animal mascot costume. In the background of her journey, viewers are left to draw their own conclusions about life in that part of the world once the transition to capitalism is officially over. There the reminders of the patriarchy are being upheld by women while the men are busy acting like irresponsible children and having a good time, plus there's the nature of capitalism, whose machinery of selling happiness can never stop, all infused with some good old dark humour from the Balkans.

This modern interpretation of the runaway bride cliché filmed in the vein of Iñárritu’s Birdman might seem a bit chaotic and superficial in the way it changes locations, moods and the topics it deals with, and some might even call it an exercise in misogyny, which is an overstatement. Simply put, the women in Giurgiu’s, Conrad Mericoffer’s and Radu Grigore’s script at least have some agenda, right or wrong, smart or stupid, while the men simply don’t, so it is not hard to guess which party gets more respect. However, in all the breathless pace, Giurgiu never stops to reflect, so everything seems a bit random and simplified, meaning-wise.

The rigid stylistic framework of the one-shot cinematography also comes with a collection of its own technical and acting challenges. As the protagonist dictates the pace of the film – as fearsome as someone at an athletics competition when the world record is to be broken – the camera has to follow, and, at times, becomes jittery. There is a bit of a room for a breather here and there, when Bianca boards one kitschily-lit train after another, but Giurgiu and his cinematographer Alexandru Dorobantu decide to try a new angle of the camera for every of those intermezzos.

Acting-wise, Andreea Vasile, glimpsed briefly in Mona Fastvold’s The World To Come (2020), has the difficult task of switching emotions and levels of energy scene after scene, ranging from anger to apathy, and she has to do so with different number of and different partners in each one of them, but she does so in sovereign fashion. Emilian Oprea as her primary partner, is restrained enough to pass as a realistic sleazy and manipulative boyfriend, as opposed to a cartoonish one. The rest of the cast members simply do not have enough material to try to shine.

In the end, 3 Days in September is a dynamic, lean, but refreshingly lightweight viewing experience, far from Giurgiu’s best work, but also worth watching. It could serve as a proper food for thought, maybe written on a post-it sticker, about what might be wrong with the world around us in modern times.

Reviewed on: 29 Aug 2026