Until 2005, when the Romanian new wave was launched with Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Romanian cinema was little known internationally. However, Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu and Cătălin Mitulescu, winners of stacks of prestigious awards, all acknowledged the influence of Lucian Pintilie, who has died aged 84.

Unlike Pintilie, these younger directors were able to make films free from the censorship that existed under Nicolae Ceauşescu, the communist despot who had controlled the arts with an iron fist. It was only when Ceauşescu was executed in 1989 that Pintilie was able to make films again in his homeland after many years of self-imposed exile, mostly in France, where he gained a reputation as a theatre director.

The films that initially got Pintilie into trouble with the authorities were Sunday at Six (1965) and Reconstruction (1968). Despite the use of metaphors of Romanian society to get by, the films were seen, quite rightly, as criticisms of totalitarianism. Sunday at Six, Pintilie’s first film, follows the romance between two communist revolutionaries at cross-purposes with the interests of the party. Its non-linear narrative, underscored by a dark sense of humour typical of the director, revealed an unacceptable “western influence”.

Lucian Pintilie at the Cannes film festival in 1994. Photograph: Micheline Pelletier Decaux/Sygma/Getty Images

Reconstruction tells the story of two juvenile delinquents who injure a waiter in a fight while drunk. The police force them to recreate their crime for an educational film on the evils of alcohol with disastrous results. Grim and sardonic, it is a disturbing work of intense realism that explains why Pintilie is known as the godfather of the Romanian new wave. The film was denounced by Ceauşescu and was not shown again in Romania for two decades.

At the same time, Pintilie was resident director of the Bulandra theatre in Bucharest, where he was supposedly free of censorship. His productions there included George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, Max Frisch’s Biedermann and the Firebugs, Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, a satire of government bureaucracy, which was suspended by the regime in 1972.

This was the last straw, causing Pintilie to take up posts at the Théâtre National de Chaillot and the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, where he staged, among other plays, Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot, Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, and Chekhov’s Three Sisters and The Seagull. He also directed Bizet’s Carmen (1983) for the Welsh National Opera in Cardiff and Molière’s Tartuffe and The Wild Duck in the US.

Pintilie was born in southern Romania in the Bessarabia region, now part of Ukraine. His father was a teacher of French and Pintilie studied at the state-supported Institute of Theatre and Cinematographic Art (IATC) in Bucharest. Despite his cosmopolitanism, he felt profoundly Romanian; almost all his films were set there and were sharp comments on the conflict between politics and ethics in that region.

A retrospective of Lucian Pintilie in the US in 2012

During his exile, he returned briefly to Romania in 1979 to shoot Carnival Scenes, which was banned before it was released. “It is true, on one level, my work does not correspond to official art,” he told the Washington Post in 1986. “My vision of the world is crueller, more sarcastic, more satirical. But at the same time, there is a great deal of tenderness underneath. ... But the bureaucratic mentality is ridiculous. They are stupid people. They live in a nightmare and they see monsters where none exists. But one day, I shall win this bet. I have a mystical conviction that I will make movies again in my country.”

He did. After the return to democracy in Romania and his return to his homeland, Pintilie was able to consolidate his reputation as a maverick master by making several eccentric films on his own terms. The Oak (1992) is a bleak allegory of the corruption and terror that marked the Ceauşescu era. It focused on the rebellion of the daughter of a former colonel of the Securitate, the Romanian political police.

The visually splendid An Unforgettable Summer (1994), set in the 1920s, starred Kristin Scott Thomas (speaking in Romanian, English and French) as the wife of an army officer who takes a decision to stand firm against her husband’s orders to execute a group of Bulgarians.

Further films were nihilistic views of post-communist Romania. Too Late (1996), about the plight of coal miners, is disguised as a thriller; Next Stop Paradise (1998) deals with the American influence on young people while The Afternoon of a Torturer (2001) resurrects the horrors of the Ceauşescu regime through the confessions of a former prison torturer.

In 2011 at the film festival in Cluj in Romania, and in 2012, in New York, Pintilie was given overdue comprehensive retrospectives, much of which came as a revelation to those who had not had the chance to see his films during the dark period in Romania.

Pintilie was married to the actor Clody Bertola from 1965 until her death in 2007.

• Lucian Pintilie, theatre and film director, born 9 November 1933; died 16 May 2018