Since the mid-2000s, Romanian cinema has been recognised by critics and international festival audiences as an original and coherent cinematic mode of expression that engages with the difficult task of trying to come to terms with the State's socialist past and articulating transformations in contemporary society. Films such as Moartea domnului Lăzărescu/The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005), A fost sau n-a fost?/12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006) and 4 luni, 3 săptămâni și 2 zile/4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu 2007) each address the problems of the legacy of the country's history and the ways in which its reverberations impact post-socialist society. Recently, several filmmakers associated with the cycle have turned to genre formulas and thereby contributed to the heterogenisation of the new Romanian cinema, but the key element is still intact: ‘the creation of a spectatorial subject position that constantly moves back and forth between often contradictory or ambiguous interpretations [of the social] offered by the texts’ (Strausz 2017: 149). While most accounts of the film cycle in question approach the works from the vantage point of realism and transparency, I argue that the films do not so much reveal a certain social world as they depict the mobile, hesitant ways in which the depicted social institutions and in turn the films’ audiences produce a reality in post-socialist society. In order to illustrate the historical-interpretive advantages of the concept of hesitation, this essay will focus on three fugitive and migrant narratives of new Romanian cinema, Aurora (Cristi Puiu 2010), Morgen (Marian Crişan 2010) and Periferic/Outbound (George Bogdan Apetri 2010), in which the characters physically move back and forth between various institutions such as the prison, the State foster home, the police and the immigration authorities. This physical movement, however, becomes a reflexive, modernist gesture about the ways in which social space is produced. By shifting and moving their characters in between these institutions and the social spaces they occupy, the films depict disorientation and hesitation as the fundamental element in the identity of the post-socialist subject.

Writing now, when the migration crisis all over Europe has reached critical dimensions, Marian Crişan's 2010 film Morgen seems prophetic.