‘P ffff!” Cristian Mungiu lets out an exasperated sigh. We are sitting in the basement of a London hotel, at the end of a long morning of back-to-back interviews for the Romanian film-maker, and his press handler has just snuck into the room to remind him of his next appointment across town. But Mungiu blanks him and leans on to his table, because he wants to tell one more story.

In 2013, Mungiu was part of a delegation of European auteurs who travelled to Brussels to meet the then president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso. At the time, the EU and US were in talks to slash barriers to trade between the two economic blocs, and the film-makers were lobbying the Commission to spare their industry from the deal .

If countries weren’t allowed to subsidise their own productions, one argument went, European cinema would become a stolid mush of homogenised co-productions – “Europudding”, as people called it at the time.…