(Romania; 90 min.) Calin Peter Netzer’s film is your classic woebegone Balkans fable. It’s 1995: the new faceless bureaucracy running Romania awards the aged and confused Ion I. Ion (Radu Beligan) a medal commemorating his valor in the Big War 50 years ago. Age and vodka have dimmed the memory of what it was he did; detective work shows that he once took a potshot at fleeing Germans. The honor ruins a life that’s already strained: he’s broke, his son hates him because of a patriotic (or compassionate) mistake he once made, and his wife has been giving him the silent treatment as long as he can remember. Netzer circles a capital city of war memorials; Philip Glass music accompanies the cityscapes of Bucharest’s cyclopean buildings. Despite the film’s celebration of futility, of tinhorn governments and of honors that come too late to do anything but blight a life, this film comes close to a happy ending as we’ve seen in the new Romanian cinema. (RvB) March 9 at 7pm, Camera 12; March 12 at 6:45pm, Camera 12