During the lockdown introduced across Europe over the
COVID-19 pandemic, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Bucharest invited 60 artists
from Austria and Romania to reflect on their future in arts and on how their art
and communities may see themselves transformed during and after the health
crisis.
The videos they submitted were posted by the Austrian Cultural
Forum Bucharest on social networks. The success of the initiative prompted the
ACF Bucharest team to entrust the distinguished theatre and film director Carmen
Lidia Vidu with the production of a documentary using the video materials of
the participating artists. We talked to Andrei Popov, deputy director of the Austrian
Cultural Forum Bucharest and delegate producer of the documentary #newTogether,
about the birth of this project that he initiated jointly with the ACF
Bucharest director Thomas Kloiber:
Andrei Popov: The project took shape the moment the pandemic was
sweeping the world. It was then that myself and Thomas Kloiber, the head of the
ACF Bucharest, asked ourselves about the usefulness our work still had, about
the role of culture at a time when people have entirely different needs, some
of them immediate, if we think back at that period. And because we couldn’t
find a satisfactory answer to this question, which I continued to think about these
2 years, we tried to find out the opinions of the main beneficiaries of our
work, that is, the artists themselves. So we asked 30 artists in Austria and 30
artists in Romania how they lived the respective period, when as you recall we
were staying at home and had no solutions, nobody knew how to make progress in
their work or whether progress in that work still meant anything. We asked them
how they saw their own future, meaning both their personal lives and their
artistic careers, after the end of the pandemic. This is how this 2-month video
experiment was born. The artists recorded the videos during the lockdown and
sent them to us. All these clips were made in that exact period, and they can
still be viewed on the ACF’s Facebook page. At the end of this experiment, one
of the participating artists, Mihai Zgondoiu, asked us if we didn’t want to
make a film using this huge collection of several tens of hours of video
recordings.
This is how the documentary #newTogether came to
be. Chosen to direct it was Carmen Lidia Vidu, an artist awarded by GOPO and
UNITER, a strong feminist voice, an opinion leader who approaches social,
political, cultural and civic themes. #newTogether
is a form of dialogue while in isolation, a firsthand testimony. Our frailty,
vulnerability, fear became a universal language, which we all spoke in 2020, during
the Covid-19 pandemic, Carmen Lidia Vidu said about the project.
Gabriel Bebeșelea, Tudor Giurgiu, Ada Hausvater, Radu
Iacoban, Dan Lungu, Dan Perjovschi, Istvan Teglas, Alexandru Weinberger, Elena
Vlădăreanu, Gottlieb Wallisch, Elise Wilk, Franzobel are some of the artists
you can see in #newTogether. Andrei Popov, deputy head of the ACF Bucharest:
Andrei Popov: Carmen Lidia Vidu reorganised the material, selected
from the scores of hours of video the most relevant parts for the story and
direction we had agreed on with Cristina Baciu, who did the animation, the
soundtrack and the editing, and did an absolutely amazing job. Carmen Lidia
Vidu and Cristina Baciu made this film which is more than a documentary or a proof
of that moment that we all experienced. This 54-minute documentary is on the
one hand a sort of dictionary of the ideas and states that we all experienced
at the time, and on the other hand it is a reflection, or better yet, a double
reflection. It is a mirror for the artists who took part in the project and faced
the camera, and also a mirror reflecting our societies, whether we think of Romania,
Austria or any other country. Because essentially we all lived the same
experience, and one of the core merits of the film is that it highlights this. Moreover,
what the director Carmen Lidia Vidu set out to do was capture both the verbal
and the non-verbal, body language, which is why she selected fragments in which
the artists convey messages by both these means.
The documentary #newTogether has been already screened
at the Timişoara National Theatre, at the Classix Festiva in Iași, and between
March 1 and 15 it was available on the New York Segal Center Film Festival on Theater
and Performance platform. (A.M.P.)