10 Lei Liviu Ciulei

Liviu Ciulei was one of the most internationally decorated Romanian directors of the twentieth century — his 1965 production of The Forest of the Hanged won the Best Director prize at Cannes, a singular achievement for Romanian cinema under Ceaușescu. The National Bank of Romania has issued collector silver pieces honoring cultural figures with some regularity since the 1990s, and this entry in that ongoing series reflects Ciulei's belated but firm place in the national canon.

Ciulei spent much of his later career in the United States, directing at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis through the 1980s — a detail that made his canonization by a Romanian state institution slightly complicated for decades.