Closer to the Moon

the movie is good but the subtitles in most movie here are delayed or advance or the mouth is not the same in the sound please fix the videos before uploading it

Unless you have at least some basic knowledge about Communist Romania, this movie might seem very far away from a rating of 10. As the story unraveled, it sucked us into an atmosphere that most of us feel is long gone, and nevertheless, so close to us. It's the period when the first cracks in an apparently perfect egalitarian world started to appear. Robbing a bank with guns in a communist country is like robbing a supermarket of its toilette paper. Money then and there was useless unless you could justify its origin. And that is what makes this story so strange for us. But there are many, many other layers to the story. The cast is great. The historical background is fascinating (at least for us, Romanians). And the cinematography is far above average. This movie was like a breath of fresh air. One full of poisonous gases, as seeing the movie, you will discover that there are many things about the human race that will upset you, but at the same time, air that provokes an uncontrollable laugh. Some people in the audience didn't appreciate the jokes. I did, because I considered it was the only way not to make the most depressing movie in the world. A masterpiece that will most probably be considered as such many years from now, when people will start making movies about our not so egalitarian society.

source: Closer to the Moon

Although Closer To The Moon is based on true events some scenes in the movie just seem not very plausible. Those scenes, that are quite unbelievable and make no sense at all, made this movie lesser good than it should have been. I really doubt the 'gangsters' were that happy in those times. In the end credits you see the actual footage of their propaganda movie and nobody seemed happy there, much more realistic than the whole movie is trying to show. The cast is really top, all actors did a good job with their respective characters, so that was the best thing about this movie and that was what makes it worth watching. Plus the excellent directing from Nae Caranfil, not so much for his writing though. Closer To The Moon isn't bad for a one time viewing.

Enjoyed watching this last night, good fun and a little less ordinary . well worth a watch

After wondering why reviews for this movie are quite polarizing, it became clear after watching the movie and reading about the history it is based on. The movie does work well as a fictional story, if you don't care about the history. It is well done, has a catchy story, and an interesting way how it is told. Unless you don't just watch Hollywood action blockbusters you might be fine with this movie. But the problem starts, when you take a look at the history. The story behind this movie is not suitable for a fairy-tale where main characters are enjoying their role. No wonder people will find this irreverent. The movie itself does refer to the story it is based on, it also provides footage of the original propaganda film - and that does not match to the way the story is told. Other things that might be irritating is that main characters are speaking English and that Romania is too colorful for that time. No problem if you get a dubbed version of the movie, no problem if you see it as a fictional story. But the movie itself makes the connection to the historical background - and that's where it doesn't work.

Harry Lloyd, Vera Farmiga, Mark Strong, and Anton Lesser star in "Closer to the Moon" from 2014. This is a fictionalized version of the The Ioanid Gang's bank robbery in Romania that took place in 1959. The gang was made up of six Jewish Romanian intellectuals (at least in this film, though there were others involved apparently). They stole Romanian lei, about $250,000 U.S. dollars from an armored car at the National Bank of Romania. This was a controversial robbery (to say the least) because no one exactly knows why they did it. The Romanian lei could only be used in Romania and not exchanged for hard currency, though supposedly the money was going to Zionist organizations. However, none of the robbers were Zionist. The film comes up with a theory. These people were underground revolutionaries fighting the Nazis in WW II. At that time, they knew they could be caught and killed at any moment. The leader says to them, robberies are never committed in Communist countries, it's something done in capitalist countries. Let's rob a bank and make people sit up and take notice and question the ideals of Communism. We never expected to live this long anyway, so let's make our lives count. If they are caught, the punishment is execution. They pull off the robbery under the guise of shooting a film. They are caught and then re-enact the robbery for a propaganda film. Were they forced to, were they told their executions would be canceled - no one knows. A strange film on a strange subject for sure. My problem was that it was presented at times in a very lighthearted way with jaunty music which was odd given that the end result was going to be execution. There's nothing wrong with using humor in serious matters - Divided We Fall is an example, as is To Be Or Not to Be, and The Producers - but this was an odd mixture that, while interesting, didn't come off. The film was also slow-moving and lacked excitement. In the real story, the woman, played by Farmiga, is not executed and ultimately freed because she had two children. In the film she has one child, and a slightly different reason is given for her freedom. The acting was good, particularly from David DeKeyser and Alan Corduner. This I don't believe is an accurate re-telling of that robbery, but if you have any interest in it, you may like this.

Just a very odd movie! A sometime film, within a film, based on true circumstances, but feeling very artificial and contrived. Closer to the Moon is a Romanian production with a Romanian director helming a cast of mainly British and American actors who speak English. Many of the scenes are filmed indoors which almost begs the question of why locate the production in Romania anyway. The answer probably is tax breaks, but as I said earlier, this alone serves to heighten the unnaturalness of this admittedly deliberately absurdist take on historical events. The actual events really do sound crazily sad with 5 Jewish mid-level Romanian communists deliberately concocting a fiasco of a bank robbery in 1959 to protest the Soviet encouraged, anti-Semitic purges. After being caught and convicted they were forced to take part in a recreation of their "crime", as a propaganda warning to others, who may be of a similar mindset. Closer to the Moon has a certain comic dark element to it, without it ever really being particularly humorous. Similarly, it fails to even have pretentions to drama and/or suspense. We know what's going to happen and all the many flashbacks and (sometimes confusing) flashbacks inside flashbacks serve to do is to delay what we know will be the inevitable. It's for this reason too, that it is difficult to identify with any potential heroes, as heroes generally don't engage in probable suicidal missions just for the fun of it, or to make a point, which is what we're asked to do here. I've always been a fan of Vera Farmiga and versatile character actor Mark Strong, but they are just wasted here playing Romanian caricatures of later 1960's American Yippie types. For an improbably largely true story, we never really are convinced of the motives behind the actions of this tiny resistance cell. I feel a more authentic, persuasive argument may have been made by writer/director Nae Caranfil by at least filming in Romania with a largely Romanian cast. As it stands, Closer to the Moon suffers from a lack of narrative cohesion, which is only exacerbated by its very uneven dramatic and comedic tone.

Vera Farmiga and Mark Strong played Romanian Jewish Communists who along with three others plot to rob the Romanian State Bank, a crime punishable by death. The court and country decide to use the case to teach a lesson in propaganda film. The burglars are acting as themselves in this film. The burglary was more about robbing the bank but anti-Communist. There is a nice romance in the film as well. Vera Farmiga and Mark Strong gave the best performances in the film. I would have liked to know more about it. The film was shot on location abroad.

You've probably never heard of the Ioanid Gang, or the bank robbery that they carried out in Bucharest in 1959. I had never heard of it before I watched Nae Caranfil's "Closer to the Moon". The movie isn't any kind of masterpiece, but sufficiently looks at this incident, and how Romania's Soviet-backed government arrested the gang and forced them to star in a propaganda film reenacting the robbery. One of the thing that we notice while watching the movie is the hypocrisy of the Eastern Bloc governments. They claimed that they were establishing classless societies but there was a high society (and the people in the government had no qualms about themselves jewelry). Later on, Nicolae Ceaușescu forced women to have as many children as possible, which overfilled Romania's orphanages. Most of the heads of state in the Eastern Bloc were typical ideologues, but Ceaușescu sounded like a mental case. Anyway, the movie's worth seeing.