Award!!

Thriller to announce that MIAZEL, George Dogaru’s new short film, has won the award for Best Narrative Short Film at the 2026 edition of the Vermont Film and Folklore Festival, held in Bennington during the first week of November.

The screenings were at Bennington Theater.

This is yet another award that George Dogaru’s magnificent short film has received in the U.S.

George Dogaru about MIAZEL:

MIAZEL means “confusion” in some Romani dialects — a word that speaks to the heart of this story.

We live in times where human rights are too often taken for granted, as if they were permanent fixtures of modern life. But history shows us otherwise: freedom is not a given — it is fragile, and must be defended constantly, even in so-called civilized societies.

This film was born out of a growing fear that authoritarianism no longer wears the face of monsters, but of polite bureaucracy, moral panic and cultural silence. I wanted to explore what happens when someone who has everything to lose — social status, comfort, a sense of identity — is suddenly marked as “other.” Not because of what they’ve done, but because of who they supposedly are.

MIAZEL is not a historical film, though its roots are tangled in the past. It’s a warning, not a reenactment. A fictional Romania of the near future, where civil liberties have eroded step by step, until people forget they were ever free. The confusion — miazel — is not just in the streets, but in people’s minds. That, I believe, is the most dangerous form of control.

This is a story about fear, complicity, and the desperate search for clarity when the system turns its gaze on you.