Romanian New Wave director Corneliu Porumboiu sits down with his father Adrian to watch a goalless match that his dad refereed in 1988. Adrian repeatedly employs some of football's greatest euphemisms as he rewatches grainy footage of a crucial derby game between FC Dinamo, the footballing wing of Romania's internal affairs ministry, and FC Steaua, the team managed by the Romanian army.

The match itself is stilted and uneventful, prompting Porumboiu jr to compare it with one of his films. But it is, what his father calls, “powerful”. By half-time, with Adrian having not interfered too much with the “flow of the game”, there are blood-soaked shirts and many static pillow shots of the crowd: it was, of course, forbidden to show unsporting behaviour in Ceausescu’s Romania.

Porumboiu the elder recalls various pre-match approaches by menacing officials but he is mostly happy to recall Gheorghe Hagi’s post-revolution career or ponder the ephemerality of the beautiful game, even when the fixture is what Bucharestians call the “eternal derby”.

Is this football? Is it a film? Is it a political history? Is it a formal experiment?

It will appeal to fans of any or all of these things. Provided the viewer doesn’t interfere with “the flow”.