“I was intensely concerned, first and foremost, with the grammatical issues of the profession. It’s true, perhaps the film has a kind of enthusiasm that I haven’t found afterwards. I wanted it to be a human story, and I believe it turned out that way. And the fact that it’s true, I don’t consider it a special merit, but an obligatory condition. I didn’t set out to make ‘Red Apples’ true or less true. I made it as I felt.”

Comedy-drama. In the world of a provincial town, a nonconformist young surgeon – a passionate consumer of red apples – imposes a moral and professional conduct that is inflexible, yet strongly colored by humor and humanity, as a response to villainy, administrative obtuseness, and careerism, which fail to bring him down or compromise him.

Based on a screenplay by Ion Băieșu, Alexandru Tatos’s film presents the charming and credible moral portrait of a young surgeon who understands his profession as a consuming passion. On one hand, the film is about dedication, talent, enthusiasm, “fire,” altruism, and on the other hand – because the film also has a “conflict,” sustained with tact and measure – it’s about opportunism, selfishness, envy, cowardice, suspicion. Among the “positive” characters crafted in Romanian films, the doctor from “Red Apples,” superbly and very nuancedly interpreted by Mircea Diaconu (the actor merging with the character and vice versa), is a commendable exception. Alongside Mircea Diaconu, the film features Angela Stoenescu (a hospital nurse whom the young doctor loves), Ion Cojar (a medical “glory” who holds meetings and “pulls strings”), Carmen Galin (a psychology professor related, as a species, to the young doctor), Ernest Maftei (a talkative old man in the emergency room), Emilia Dobrin, Florin Zamfirescu, Mitică Popescu… It has been rightly considered, in premiere reviews, that a film like “Red Apples” has effectively contributed to the maturation of our contemporary cinema.