The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 brought cultural and political liberation to the former Eastern bloc. But as these nations soon discovered, the collapse of communism was catastrophic for cinema. Even now, 20 years later, many film-makers are struggling to adjust to a harsh new artistic and economic climate.

However, some hopeful green shoots have sprouted from the rubble in recent years. While the old guard of Polish, Czech and Hungarian cinema has declined in international prestige, the younger directors of Romania are emerging as the chic new kids on the bloc. Having its premiere at the London Film Festival tomorrow is Tales from the Golden Age, the follow-up by the 41-year-old Cristian Mungiu’s to his globally acclaimed abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007.

Produced, co-written and co-directed by Mungiu, Tales from the Golden Age is a collective project made by several figures from Romania’s new wave. Like his previous film, this grimly funny collection of urban folktales takes place during the twilight of the Ceausescu regime. Many of the finest Romanian films of recent times, including Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12.08 East of Bucharest and Catalin Mitulescu’s The Way I Spent the End of the World, share a bittersweet “Ostalgia” for the communist era. But Mungiu insists that these are universal human stories, not political parables.

“I don’t think these films are directly about the communist system,” he says. “They are about the side-effects of the system on people, but they never talk directly about the system. This is the big difference between what we do now and the films that older directors made in the early 1990s in their films about the communist times.”

From the 1960s to the 1980s, East and Central European cinema enjoyed its own golden age, particularly among Western audiences. Whether in the sardonic social commentaries of the Czech new wave pioneer Jirí Menzel, the loaded historical allegories of the Hungarian István Szabó, or the heavyweight moral treatises of the Polish Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Eastern bloc films combined high production values with a subversive political subtext. But after communism collapsed, so did foreign interest in these samizdat stories and their dissident directors.

Adding injury to insult was the sudden arrival of capitalist market rules. After 1989, with their economies in freefall, the impoverished Eastern bloc nations all slashed state funding for what Lenin once called “the most important art”. Hundreds of traditional cinemas were sold or closed, replaced by foreign-owned multiplexes that inevitably promoted Hollywood blockbusters over local productions. State-owned studios were privatised.

“The industries more or less collapsed after 1989,” says Michael Brooke, the curator of the BFI’s Towards a New Europe season, a three-month programme of films about post-communist Europe running at the National Film Theatre. “Virtually every country had economic shock therapy, so funding films was not top of the agenda. ”

Ironically, for directors accustomed to working with allegory and allusion during the heavily censored Soviet era, greater freedom of speech proved problematic. Big Brother was no longer watching them, but nor was anybody else. “Censorship can be a creative force,” argues Robert Rider, the head of cinema at the Barbican Centre in London, whose Behind the Wall season in November unites films from six former Eastern bloc countries. “For a lot of leading East European directors of post-Second World War cinema — Wajda, Szabó, Menzel — it was clear the repressive regime spurred their creativity. It’s not exactly a novel notion, but artists thrive when they’ve got something to kick against.”

“Nobody’s pretending the communist system was wonderful,” Brooke adds. “But once a project got approved, there was generally less interference than if they were making it for a capitalist system.”

Romanian cinema is still struggling for survival. From 800 screens in the Ceausescu era, there are now barely 30 traditional cinemas serving a nation of 21 million people. In 2007, Mungiu even resorted to hiring a projector truck to take 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days on a tour of the provinces. However, he refuses to accept that film culture was better off under communism.

“You can’t really compare,” he says. “We had 800 screens 20 years ago, but it was the only fun thing people could do. This is why cinema was very popular. Our lives have changed dramatically, but not only because of communism. I wouldn’t say the old regime was better. It was a state system so it was easier to finance films, but most of the films produced were just crap.”

Tales from the Golden Age is at The Times BFI London Film Festival on Sat and Mon (www.bfi.org.uk/lff; 020-7928 3232), then on general release on Oct 30; the Barbican’s Behind the Wall season runs from Nov 7-16; the BFI’s Towards a New Europe seasons is at the NFT until Dec 31

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