Romania doesn't have much of a film industry to speak of. Financing projects is a nightmare and usually dependent on foreign money and, until quite recently, the industry was controlled by a corrupt residue of the communist days, a compromised 'jury' who decided who got the funds and tended to award them to mediocre lackeys.

All the more remarkable, then, that over the past three years a small group of extremely talented filmmakers have shoved Romanian cinema to the centre of the international stage.

Their platform has been the Cannes Film Festival. In 2006, Corneliu Porumboiu won the 'Camera d'Or' award for 12.08 East of Bucharest, his dark comedy about the day Nikolai Ceaucescu was overthrown.

A year earlier, Cristi Puiu won the coveted 'Un Certain Regard' award for his truly exceptional film The Death of Mr Lazarescu, which followed one man's ultimately fatal journey through Romania's ramshackle Communist-era public health system.

And in 2007, Cristian Nemescu posthumously won the 'Un Certain Regard' award for his ambitous drama, California Dreamin', while Cristian Mingiu went one better by doing something no Romanian had ever done -- winning the Palme d'Or.

He achieved this with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a compelling and exceptionally skilful piece of film-making about a particularly unpleasant consequence of Ceaucescu's despotism, which opened here yesterday.

Shot for less than €600,000, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days examines the implications of the Communist dictator's anti-abortion laws, and is based on a true story that has haunted Cristian Mingiu for years. In 1966, as part of his bizarre attempt to boost Romania's population, Ceaucescu reversed a 1957 decree permitting abortion, and imposed heavy jail sentences on both practitioners and patients. This simply drove the practise undergound, and alarming numbers of women died or were maimed during botched clandestine operations.

In Mingiu's film, set in 1987, harried opening scenes in a busy student dorm lead to the revelation that Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), a young student, is unhappily pregnant. Gabita is weak and panicky, so her friend Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) helps her by booking a hotel room and going to meet the shady character who's going to perform the abortion.

When Otilia gets to the hotel where Gabita had supposedly made the booking, an unpleasant concierge denies all knowledge of it, so Otilia is forced to take a room in another, more expensive hotel.

This leaves them a bit short of the abortion price, and instead of allowing them to pay him part now and the rest in a few days, the abortionist insists they both have sex with him in order to make up the difference. Gabita is more than four months gone, and if he doesn't perform the abortion now, no one else will. So they agree, and the man completes a clumsy procedure and leaves them to it.

While Gabita lies and waits for the inevitable to happen, their situation is further complicted by the fact that Otilia has promised her boyfriend that she'll go to his mother's birthday. So she leaves, and spends a tortuous few hours listening to the inane chattering of her boyfriend's family while she worries about what is happening back at the hotel. These backstreet abortions often provoked fatal bleeding, and Otilia eventually rushes back to help her friend.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the most painfully honest examination of this difficult subject that I've ever seen. It's only briefly graphic, and instead concentrates on the emotional turmoil of these two women, and the ridiculous situation that one man's twisted utopian vision has forced them into. And in a way it reaches beyond its subject and into a cleverly oblique examination of the nonsensical dynamics of totalitarianism, with the gutsy and compassionate Otilia becoming a symbol of the coming Romanian uprising.

It's taken some time for Romanian filmmakers to come to terms with the legacy of Ceaucescu, but it's now become a fruitful source of new and exciting cinema, and Cristian Mingiu intends this film to be part of a series on the late Communist era.

Nikolai Ceaucescu's disastrous impact on his country is well-known, but for women his rule was especially unfortunate. As part of the 1966 abortion decree mentioned earlier, Ceaucescu introduced a series of bizarre measures aimed at increasing Romania's birth rate. A special tax of between ten and 20 per cent was levied on the incomes of men and women who remained childless after 25 -- whether married or single, and irrespective presumably of their capacity to procreate.

Abortion was limited to cases whether the mother was over 42, or already had at least four children. Mothers of five or more children were entitled to significant benefits, and mothers of ten or more children were accorded heroic status, and given a gold medal, a free car, free public transport and so on.

Analogous to this, divorce was made very difficult. Ceacuescu had very particular notions of how family life ought to pan out, and the Romanian public were expected to follow it to the letter.

The result of all this social engineering was, of course, disastrous.

Apart from the misery caused by backstreet abortions, a mushrooming population accompanied by rising poverty resulted in a huge increase in child abandonment.

Homeless children became a depressingly common sight, and the orphanages swelled beyond capacity, leaving a legacy of misery that was uncovered after the fall ofommunism.

As a result of Ceaucescu's insistence on things being as he imagined them, the regime refused to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS in the late 1980s -- an unnecessary epidemic was the result.

When Ceaucescu was shot by an impromptu firing squad in 1989, some international observers tut-tutted about the kangaroo nature of the court that had tried him. It's a pity there was only one of him to shoot.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days opened at the IFI Temple Bar yesterday.

- Paul Whitington