The Arizona American-Romanian Cultural Collaborative (ARCC) started in 2019 from a desire to showcase and promote the Romanian culture in the communities where its founders and fellow Romanians live and work. This desire emerged from the strong confidence – reinforced by the worldwide recognition of Romanian arts – that the culture of Romania can constitute an inspiring and powerful presence in Arizona, one of the most diverse states in the US.
The approximately 85,000 ethnic Romanian who nowadays call the Grand Canyon State home come from a beautiful country, with a lively and influential culture. Arizona ARCC wishes to feature Romanian culture and the variety of its art forms, from theater, literature and visual arts to traditional crafts, food, music, photography, and more.
The Collaborative wants to be an energizing participant in the vibrant multicultural scene of the Phoenix metropolitan area, by infusing it with the fascinating art produced by Romanians. One of our major aspirations is to weave more deeply and substantially the Romanian cultural spirit into the fabric of Phoenix artistic life, by engaging local cultural and educational communities and institutions in collaborative events and programs.
Arizona ARCC also wants to serve as a dynamic connection between the Arizona Romanian community and Romania’s contemporary artistic movements, other like-minded diasporic communities, and, more generally, all the people of Arizona.
We are hoping that our work will be especially appealing to those who love to be surprised, those who like to explore fresh perspectives, those who are eager to discover new worlds of meaning and experience, and those who constantly need unique formulas to nourish their minds and souls.
For our first event, The Arizona Film Festival, we partnered up with the Making Waves festival to introduce you to The Romanians: 30 Years of Cinema Revolution. The retrospective invites you to discover and examine the emerging forms of filmic expression that followed the fall of Communism.
Dubbed by the international critics as the New Romanian Wave, the movies created during the last 30 years share a minimalist approach peppered with a quirky black humor that will captivate your imagination. We expect you to experience what the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott did when he noted, “After a while, you feel you are living inside these movies as much as watching them.”