Mariana Gheorghe
Chief Executive, Petrom
Romania is still recovering from a catastrophic brain drain. In the 1990s many of the country’s brightest opted to leave to pursue careers in academia and finance in Europe and America. Few have returned, though Ms Gheorghe, chief executive of Petrom, Romania’s largest company, is part of the trickle. Ms Gheorghe graduated in law from Bucharest University in the 1989. After a stint working at a state chemicals company and the finance ministry in the early 1990s,she rose to become a senior banker at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. She was appointed chief executive of Petrom, a subsidiary of Austria’s OMV, in 2006, and is a rare female chief executive in a country with one of the lowest levels of female participation in the workforce.

Cristian Mungiu
Film Director
Mr Mungiu won the Palme d’Or for his film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a harrowing portrayal of a woman seeking an abortion in the last years of the Ceausescu regime. He was just two years out of film college during the Romanian film industry’s 2000 annus horribilis, when “not a single Romanian film was made all year”. Things have improved since then, even if the country’s film industry is highly dependent on work for US and German productions. Mobra Films, the company he owns with two director partners, got its start doing service production for a big-budget German feature film. The aim has always been to rely less on contract work – documentaries and adverts – and survive as an independent creative production company, though Mr Mungiu acknowledges that Romania’s film industry would never survive without government subsidies.