A great contemporary film from Romania: Beyond the Hills

Contemporary Romanian cinema is not for everyone, but for those (like me) who love long and thoughtful narratives about "real" people, movies in the tradition of great 19th-century naturalist (and realist) fiction, Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills (2012) is must-see. The narrative, in brief, set in rural, contemporary Romania, is about a 20-something woman, recently "released" from the orphanage where she was raised (since birth I think) who has now entered a strict Eastern Orthodox convent in the hills beyond the borders of a small city. At the start of the film she is visited by a friend, Alina, who was also raised in the orphanage and is returning from her Germany where she has felt horribly lonely and insecure. We soon learn that the two women had a sexual relationship while in the orphanage, and Alina hopes to draw her friend (I'll call her V) away from the convent so the two can live together. V, however, rebuffs these overtures - she has fully bought into the strict rules of the convent, run by a priest (Father, or sometimes Papa), which perhaps is common in the Eastern Orthodox, I don't know. In any event, the push Alina to make her confession, which leads to a nervous breakdown and many other developments, which I will not divulge. There is a quiet beauty of this film: the sensitive dialog, the examination of a wide range of issues - including medical care, religious faith, social services, as well as personal relationships over time - with at least some sympathy for and understanding of all sides of the many issues. Aside from provoking thought and comment, right down to the dramatic conclusion and the surprising final sequence, there is a visual beauty to this film as well, in particular the re-creation of the austere life in the monastery and the many scenes, including a great scene in the local hospital, where the sisters gather into a group that looks like a late-renaissance portrait and you want to just grab the image and frame it and wish you didn't have to read the subtitles. This kind of movie would never be made in the U.S. (Scorsese's Silence maybe comes close) but at least it's available from Criterion, including streaming.