Graduation (2016)—Romania

Cristian Mungiu wrote, directed, and produced this film, which debuted at Cannes and won him a Best Director Award. He tells the story of a middle-aged doctor named Romeo, who lives and works in a small town. He and his estranged wife Magda returned to Romania in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when anything seemed possible. He deeply regretted that decision, and so he's heavily invested in his daughter Eliza and her scholarship to Cambridge — contingent upon passing her final high school exams. That's complicated when she's attacked the day before the exams, and further complicated by a way to fix the results to insure success, a plan about which Romeo and Magda disagree. Add to this mix Eliza's boyfriend Maurius whom Romeo dislikes, his girlfriend Sandra who teaches at Eliza's school, and prosecutors that enter the plot in the last part of the movie, and you have a genuinely complex moral dilemma in a society where it's difficult to live honestly. Graduation was named one of the top ten films of 2017 by the New York Times. The film is in Romanian with English subtitles. I watched it on Netflix Streaming.