Sixteen years after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, everything still looks a damp, mossy green in Romania — as if vivid color was a luxury the post-dictatorship society could not yet afford. It’s also one of the deliciously dry touches that make “12:08 East of Bucharest” such an off-hand comic treat.

In director Corneliu Porumboiu’s feature debut, which begins a two-week run today at Film Forum, the not-so-solid citizens of a drab backwater town remain immersed in the kind of institutional mediocrity that often served as the butt of jokes in Eastern Bloc cinema.

The only time the screen brightens is when one of the locals, an elderly man named Pisconi (Mircea Andreescu) trundles about in a Santa Claus costume. He’s part of a triumvirate of affectionate but hapless oddballs whose paths converge on the gloomy winter anniversary of December 22, 1989.

Virgil Jderescu (Teodor Corban) is the fatuous host of a local TV show who hopes to establish that the spark of freedom flared in his town before 12:08 — when the nation’s new era began — which would reflect on the heroism of his fellow men. Unfortunately, his best witnesses are the addle-pated Pisconi and a college history professor named Manescu (Ion Sapdaru), a drunk who spends much of his time dodging friends to whom he owes money.

The film unspools in the tradition of Eastern European village comedies, establishing a network of eccentric characters whose personal flaws seem to reflect the larger failings of the system surrounding them, even as they also imply the necessary compromises and indulgences that make survival possible. Mr. Porumboiu has a keen sense for small moments that crackle in the margins of an ordinary day: pesky boys running into the hallways of those famously grim Romanian apartment blocks and detonating firecrackers; or a makeshift community Gypsy brass band rudely approximating a salsa beat as a chubby kid sings, “Latino music is my life,” while someone videotapes the performance.

The film’s ambling, discursive flow eventually leads to the local TV station, where Jderescu asks the increasingly rhetorical question, “Was there, or was there not, a revolution in our town?” The dead-on spoof of an actual Romanian talk show, complete with shaky framing and microphone thumping, evokes a more genuine version of “Borat,” as the host’s efforts to redeem his topic go down in flames.

Almost from the start, it’s obvious that Manescu is lying about his anti-establishment zeal, and as his ever more distressed interrogator mangles and misquotes Plato and Heraclitus, random callers phone in to expose the professor in his lies. Meanwhile, old man Pisconi fashions paper boats.

Through June 19 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).