About Us
We are American Romanian Cultural Society (ARCS) Arizona
Here to inspire and connect.
ARCS Arizona wants to be an energizing participant in the vibrant multicultural scene of the Phoenix metropolitan area. One of our major goals is to weave more deeply and substantially the Romanian cultural spirit into the fabric of Greater Phoenix artistic life, by engaging local cultural and educational communities and institutions in collaborative events and programs.
We also aim to serve as a dynamic connection between the Arizona Romanian community and Romania’s contemporary artistic movements, other like-minded diasporic communities, and, more generally, all the people of Arizona.
We are hoping that our work will be especially appealing to those who love to be surprised, those who like to explore fresh perspectives, those who are eager to discover new worlds of meaning and experience, and those who constantly need unique formulas to nourish their minds and souls.
Our History
We started as the Arizona American-Romanian Cultural Collaborative (ARCC), in 2019, from a desire to showcase and promote Romanian culture in the communities where its founders and fellow Romanians live and work. This desire emerged from the strong confidence – reinforced by the worldwide recognition of Romanian artistic productions – that Romania’s culture can be an inspiring and powerful presence in Arizona, one of the most diverse states in the US.
For our first project, the Arizona Romanian Film Festival, we partnered up with the Making Waves festival to introduce you to The Romanians: 30 Years of Cinema Revolution. The retrospective was supposed to invite you to discover and examine the emerging forms of filmic expression that followed the fall of Communism.
Dubbed by the international critics as the New Romanian Wave, the movies created during the last 30 years share a minimalist approach peppered with a quirky black humor that will captivate your imagination. We expect you to experience what the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott did when he noted, “After a while, you feel you are living inside these movies as much as watching them.”
Unfortunately, even as we were ready to go in March 2020, we had to cancel the festival due to the pandemic. In 2020, we partnered with American Romanian Cultural Society (ARCS) from Seattle and the first edition of the Arizona Romanian Film Festival happened entirely online.
With its almost a decade of successful cultural programming, ARCS has become both a role model and a generous collaborator. In addition to the film festival, we worked together on a number of various projects and events.
In May 2022 we became ARCS Arizona. The name change emphasizes our association’s engagement in the ARCS network and its commitment to the collaborative, concerted effort to increase the visibility of the Romanian culture and Romanian diaspora in the US.
