In June 1941, Curzio Malaparte (Florin Piersic Jr.), an Italian journalist and member of the Fascist party, arrives in the Romanian city of Iasi on the way to cover the Russian front for an Italian newspaper. Suffering from severe allergies, he is referred to Josef Gruber (Marcel Iures), a local Jewish doctor. Desperate to find the missing doctor, Malaparte must navigate the outrageous and increasingly sinister bureaucracy of Nazi-occupied Romania. What begins as an absurdist wild goose chase leads directly to the heart of the final solution, and the disastrous fate of the local Jews. Gruber’s Journey is the first Romanian fiction feature film to explore the Holocaust and the murder of the Romanian Jews. |