Radu Gabrea

Radu Bartolomeu Gabrea (20 June 1937 – 9 February 2017) was a Romanian film director and screenwriter. He directed more than twenty films between 1969 and 2016. He showed his first film in the Locarno Festival.

He was born in Bucharest, the son of Iosif Gabrea, a university professor, and Maria Lehrmann, a school teacher who came from a German family from Transylvania. Gabrea attended the city's , and then enrolled in the Technical University of Civil Engineering, graduating in 1960. During that time, he participated in the Bucharest student movement of 1956; arrested and interrogated by the Securitate, he was detained for nine months, of which six were spent in solitary confinement. In 1973, he directed , a film adaptation of the novel The Angel Cried, by Fănuș Neagu; after a private viewing, the film was personally stopped by Nicolae Ceaușescu from being shown in Romanian cinemas. For a year, Gabrea fought unsuccessfully with the communist censorship for the release of the movie; nevertheless, he obtained a passport to go to Cannes to accompany his film, which had been selected in the "Quinzaine des Réalisateurs". There, he defected and went to West Germany, where he lived for the next two decades, working first as an engineer, and then returning to film directing with , a free adaptation of Ion Luca Caragiale's short story O făclie de Paște. In 1983, he obtained a PhD in Social Communications from Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, with thesis Werner Herzog et la mystique rhénane,

After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Gabrea returned to his native country, where he contributed to the relaunch of cinematography, through his significant activity as a director, screenwriter, producer, and organizer of cinematographic events. On February 24, 2011, he was decorated with the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his special contributions to German–Romanian cultural relations and the understanding of German–Romanian history.

With his first wife, film critic Roxana Gabrea (née Pană), he had a daughter, Maria Magdalena Schubert. He later remarried with actress , whom he met at the filming of , and with whom he collaborated on numerous film and theater projects.

Selected filmography (1970) (1970) (1971, TV film) (1973, TV film) (1974) (1981) (1984) Ein Unding der Liebe (1988, TV film) The Secret of the Ice Cave (1989) (1993) (2002) (2007) Gruber's Journey (2008) (2010) (2012) (2014) Împărăteasa roșie. Viața și aventurile Anei Pauker (2016)