Category: World of Culture

The documentary Teach by Alex Brendea, one of the most awarded Romanian documentaries in the last few years, was launched in early October in movie theaters, but had its drive-in cinema premiere recently. It tells the story of Dorin Ionita, a mathematics teacher in the city of Bistrita who breaks out of the regular education system, starting his own private class in his own home. His greatest dream is to have a school that does not conform to traditional education, a place free of the tyranny of conventional teaching methods. The movie won the 2019 Best Central and Eastern European Documentary in the Between the Seas section of the International Documentary Film Festival in Jihlava, in the Czech Republic. It also won the award for best film in the Romanian competition at the 2019 Astra Film Festival. The premiere had been scheduled for May, but the pandemic delayed it. However, even before the Romanian premiere, Teach had a few screenings for an audience, such as the one at the Czech Center in New York, at the third edition of the Jihlava International Documentary Festival, and the TIFF, where it sold out. The audience had the opportunity to meet in person Dorin Ionita, the charismatic teacher in the movie, in the Q&A sessions.

Alex Brendea told us about the screening that took place in the town of Bistrita, home of the actual teacher:

“I was great, because at least in Cluj and in Bistrita we were playing a home game, so to say. At the movie theater in Bistrita we announced two screenings, but then we had to add more. For instance, one day we were supposed to have a single showing of the movie, but we ended up with three. After that, upon audience demand, the managers of the theater scheduled three more days of screenings. That was a pleasant surprise, because the movie ended up being shown in both movie theaters in Bistrita, and a lot of people showed up to see it. Also, the other thing that made me happy was the fact that lots of teachers showed up with their students. It made me happy because we are talking about a documentary, which is a bit of a niche genre. However, it seems that in this case the topic of the film and the main character helped a lot. We are in a time when a lot is being discussed about education, and the way the system works in Romania, a lot of parents are quite upset at the things that dont work. A lot of parents came to me after watching the movie, people who want to have around more teachers like Dorin Ionita. We had some great reactions, I met lots of teachers who had seen to movie, and they talked to me about their innovative or original ideas about education. They told me how they were thwarted by the bureaucracy, or by lack of interest. One of these teachers teaches geography, and she wanted to build a virtual platform, where they wanted to teach forms of relief using 3D graphics, which seems like a great idea. In Cluj, I met a teacher who told me that I had managed, with this documentary, to bring up an alternative to the present system of education, said he was glad he saw the movie, he told me he really enjoyed it, and was inspired by it. What I wanted to do first and foremost with this movie was to sound an alarm, and try to inspire more teachers to follow their dreams in the wish to do something better for their students.”

Having a lot of experience as a cinematography director, Alex Brendea belives that documentary offers him more freedom than fiction films:

“Somehow, the documentary needs this freedom, because it is not backed by a script, and that is why you dont know what kind of framing or lighting you will have in the next sequence. I am intrigued by that, because I have to find solutions, and to react quickly to those situations. There is a way in which the documentary takes more of a toll during shooting, but compared to fiction film, it takes less preparation. In the case of fiction, finding the best framing and lighting takes places ahead of time, and during shooting you come with your homework done. For documentaries you have to be freer to find solutions on the spot.”

One of the awards received by the movie Teach was the 2019 Best Central and Eastern European Documentary in the Between the Seas section of the International Documentary Film Festival in Jihlava, in the Czech Republic. The reason provided by the jury was This is an important film that has to be seen by people. A mathematics teacher works on the fringes of a failed system of education, and he becomes the mentor of a group of students. By his dedication towards education, he teaches the students the most important lesson in life: You have to tragically fall in love with what you do. For its celebration of the unconventional, for embracing disorder, imagination, and passion for education, the Between the Seas award goes to the movie Teach.

“Acasa, My Home”, Radu Ciorniciuc’s debut documentary film had its international premiere at Sundance Film Festival, the most important independent film festival in the US, where it won the cinematography award. The documentary, that tells the story of a family who lived 20 years in harmony with nature in the wilderness of the Vacaresti Delta until they were chased out when the place became a protected area, also won the big prize of the Munich International Documentary Festival, the Special Jury Award at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, the big prize of the Krakow Film Festival, the Human Rights Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival and the Moral Approach Award at the MakeDox Documentary Film Festival in Macedonia.

Radu Ciorniciuc and scriptwriter Lina Vdovîi had initially planned to make a report about the Văcărești Delta, the wildest place in Bucharest. The story of the Enache family, who had lived for almost 20 years in the Văcărești Delta and who, in 2016, when the park was declared a nature reserve, had to move to the city with their nine children, made Radu and Lina dropt their initial plan in favour of a documentary. It took the team four years to make the documentary, during which time they watched and filmed the family’s transition from the middle of nature to the hustle and bustle of the city.

Radu Ciorniciuc: “My fascination with this story has a lot to do with how I saw these people build and strengthen their families. Also, the childrens strong relationship with nature was another topic that was very important to me. Then, after the Enache family moved to the city, I was of course very interested in following their adjustment process. The story turned out to be quite complex, although four years ago, when I started this project, I would have said that things are quite simple and I would have not considered making a film. I thought we would make a report that adds a social dimension to the story of the Văcăresti Delta. It was quite natural how the story unfolded. Working on this film for so many years, other ideas came to us along the way and things started to fall into place. In terms of editing, its always a challenge to navigate through hundreds of hours of material and extract what you consider to be the essence of the story. Its a challenge to compress, as a director, as a storyteller, almost three hundred hours of tape into an 86-minute film. It seemed almost impossible to tell the whole story, but together with the films scriptwriter, Lina Vdovii, the films producer Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan, and especially the films editor, Andrei Gorgan, we managed to get the essence out of the three hundred hour material, without losing the important themes of the film. The editing lasted two years precisely because it is not always easy to compress so much material and at the same time to give the story its best form in a few tens of minutes. ”

Radu Ciorniciuc and screenwriter Lina Vdovii wanted, first of all, to make the voices of the characters heard. In their opinion, only by having access to the characters’ perspective one can truly empathize with them and understand how difficult it is to integrate a Roma community into society. Although “Acasa, My Home” enjoyed huge international recognition, Radu Ciorniciuc did not have the opportunity to accompany his film to many festivals: “I went to a lot of places online, from my little office, via zoom. However, we managed to physically attend the festivals in Zurich, where we won a special mention, and in Cologne, where we won another important award that gave the film visibility. It was very emotional and very exciting because we met real people gathered around a project that we worked on a lot, a project on which we wanted to have debates and discussions. Having full cinema halls and people very interested in our story was truly rewarding. We also had a Q&A session that gave us a lot of energy and optimism at the thought that we, humans, are survivors and we know to keep the good things in our lives. And one of these good things is to bring people together around a story. I think this is extraordinary, because we will never lose interest in and curiosity about stories.”

The documentary “Acasa, My Home” is also in the official selection of the European Film Academy Awards (EFA) and premiered on HBO GO on October 15.

The 24th edition of the French Film Festival was held between September 23 and October 4, 2020 simultaneously in Bucharest and another 10 cities of Romania: Cluj-Napoca, Timişoara, Iaşi, Arad, Braşov, Brăila, Constanţa, Sfântu Gheorghe, Sibiu and Suceava. The 94 films in the festival were screened on big screens both indoors and outdoors. We talked to Ioana Dragomirescu, the coordinator of the Elvire Popesco cinema hall in Bucharest and the festival’s selector, about this year’s edition of the French Film Festival which took place under the motto “Le film français au féminin’ — ‘Women in French film’. The festival focused on women’s cinematographic creation, bringing to the forefront women film producers, actresses and remarkable female characters.

“I have chosen this theme because it is quite topical. In the cinematographic industry, just like in many other industries, there is still gender inequality, as most directors and scriptwriters are men. Of course, actresses are visible, but I think it is important to equally highlight women’s creative potential. They should not be regarded simply as something nice to look at, as has happened so far. That is why we have wanted, through this festival, organized annually by the French Institute in Bucharest, to remind everyone that it is important to acknowledge women’s perspective on reality, that their perspective should be known and seen by all of us. The polemics that led to the emergence of the ‘Me Too’ actions in the US is known around the world. There was much talk about nominations to the Oscar or Cesar Awards, talks generated by the fact that men always have the upper hand. This trend is also visible in the Romanian film industry, where, in the past ten years, only 19% of the Romanian film productions have been directed or co-directed by women. To have equal representation of both men and women, we need to go a long way. Through this festival we have wanted to bring our own contribution in this sense, and to sound the alarm as to this gender inequality. To select the films for the festival was not difficult, because, to be honest, there are many, good-quality films directed by women or featuring women in the main roles.”

We also spoke with Ioana Dragomirescu about the structure of this edition of the French film festival:

“Films were divided into the 3 already-known categories. ‘Focus on young directors’ is the first category, aimed at introducing young talents, male and female directors at the start of their careers, who made one or two feature films. The Panorama of French Films of the Year is a wider and more visible section, under which we try to bring in the most remarkable films of the current year, films that have had box office or critical success, as well as success in festivals. The third section of the festival, a more niche section, is in collaboration with the prestigious criticism review Cahiers du Cinema, and with Joachim Lepastier, one of the critics with the review, who helps us every year to organize a selection around a given topic. This year the theme was Vive les insoumouses, an homage to our rebellious muses, both in front and behind the camera. For this section, this year we had a selection of films made entirely by women. These films showcase characters that are absolutely remarkable, which at their time were revolutionary, either because they dealt with preconceived ideas, or of a whole industry. In this section I would suggest two titles, and I would begin with the title that provides the title of the section, the documentary Delphine et Carole, which takes the audience back to the feminism of the 70s. We recommend this documentary, featuring French actress Delphine Seyrig and Swiss filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos, who militates with a camera on her shoulder to promote the right of women to have their own artistic viewpoint. As the slogan of the festival we borrowed a phrase from Delphine Seyrig herself, who says in the documentary that it was time for women to film themselves. In addition, this year we have proposed a selection of short film made more than a century ago by Alice Guy, the first woman filmmaker in the history of cinema.”

Part of the festival Le film français au féminin was also Rezidenta FemArt as a partner, which is a project run by the Romanian Association of Women in Cinema. As part of this residency, five Romanian directors from Romania who are just starting in the business took part in an intensive week of working with experts, but also in a series of screenings as part of the festival, in master classes, and in pitching sessions, partially hosted by the French Institute in Bucharest. The festival also brought homage to the great filmmaker Agnes Varda, by showing her film Varda par Agnes.

The -escu Family Diary is the most recent documentary by Serban Georgescu, and is the story of millions of Romanians who, by force of circumstance, have come to live within these borders and had to put up with each other, just as things are in a great family. It is a journey in time and space, in which this family is the bridge between moments that have united us, but also moments that have pulled us apart along the years. The director seeks answers together with writer Ioana Parvulescu, theoretician and feminist militant Mihaela Miroiu, analyst and expert in public policy Sorin Ionita, writer and analyst Stelian Tanase, publicist and diplomat Theodor Paleology, and sociologist Vintila Mihailescu. He also has the help of the personal archives of dozens and dozens of people. So far it was officially selected for a number of national film festivals, such as the Transylvania International Film Festival TIFF, the European Film Festival, the Rasnov film festival, and Arkadia Shortfest. The documentary has been enthusiastically reviewed by critics, being called the best cultural product made for the Centennial. Here is the director himself, Serban Georgescu:

“When I got the proposal to make a documentary about the Centennial, I was very hesitant. I was thinking that there is no point in making yet another movie saying what happened from an academic and historical point of view. Such films are welcome, of course. Thinking how to approach the topic, I finally thought that I would tell the story of a family. I gave it the generic name -escu, and the film tells the story of this family which traverses a century of Romanian history. That was in order to be spared accusations that I skipped certain events, and the subjective tone helped me insinuate my way through a century full of events, and to stay within the confines of an hour and a half of film, in which it is very difficult to squeeze a century without forgetting some more or less important events.”

Through the stories told by great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and brothers-in-law, The -escu Family Diary is a review of events great and small that have affected everyone since the Great Union. Each of us becomes a small witness of great events in these last hundred years. Here is Serban Georgescu once again:

“I will try to explain how I used the idea of family, to make it clearer for the listeners. I structured the film into small chapters. I covered language, I explored the borders, I got to fashion, music, occupations, I reviewed the things that this generic family went through, aspects that are outside of the grand historic definition of what happened to a nation, I am emphasizing the things that unite us in day to day life. Because we are united by the music we listen to, what we eat, or the opposite — the way we were starving during communism, the way in which we relate to sports, for instance. That is why I used the story of my family, recalling small events with my grandfather, uncle, aunt, cousin, in order to elevate the story of my family to the level of the grand overarching story, trying to see if it reflects the bigger story.”

In the Metropolis newspaper, Ionut Mars writes:

In the documentary The -escu Family Diary, director Serban Georgescu discusses in a playful, ironic tone what it means to be Romanian 100 years since the appearance of modern Romania, a period in which the country went through many shocks and transformations. In a landscape of Romanian non-fiction that is very serious and drab, with observational sequences that emphasize painful social topics, director Serban Georgescu has a different approach, under which he bets on a playful irony and bittersweet humor. It is a film in which a personal story melts into a general perspective.”

Here is Serban Georgescu once again:

“I sought answers helped by the personalities that appear in the movie, by my guests, in the idea of discovering if this grand family had a common destiny, we all had a place in this space, and if events in the last century have united us or divided us. And this idea, of using my family, resonated with the audience. Because I recalled various members of my family, and because I used a personal archive, people identified very easily with what they saw. We all have childhood pictures with grandparents, for instance, and I think it was a great idea, because people easily identified. It was a technique to help people get drawn into the story, and I used lots of humor to attract young people. Because I realized, making earlier movies, that humor is very useful in order to gain them over and help them get into the story.”

During the month dedicated to women, the Humanitas in Cismigiu Bookstore hosted the launch of the volume The Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania, authored by Maria Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu. The book analyzes the way that women are perceived in post-communist Europe. Maria Bucur teaches gender studies at the University of Indiana in the US. She told us that this book was a special opportunity for her:

“The entire project started, obviously, from the friendship that I have with Mihaela, which led me to read a lot and discussed a lot. It lasted 10 years, but it was worth it. I learned an enormous amount. I didnt use to think as normatively as I do now. I think I had very much to learn. My interdisciplinarity has widened enormously, and this is extraordinary for me. The opportunity to meet these women that Mihaela introduced was the chance of a lifetime.”

Field research led to a history of women in Romania after 1990. The book by Maria Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu is the first such endeavor in Romania:

“The history chapter, which provides a historical context, was not there in the beginning. We ran field studies that we wanted to analyze, and we realized that in fact in Romania there is no history of women to help you understand these voices, the space to place them, and what gender structures and norms have led their legal, political, and educational status.”

Mihaela Miroiu teaches at the National School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest. She is one of the founders of feminist and gender studies in Romania, as well as of the first gender studies graduate and doctoral degrees in the country. The book she launched at Humanitas was initially a personal project:

“In a way, this book was my moment of saying Let me get back to the primordial woman. The ones who raised me, as a generation, the ones among which I was shaped, as a generation, and the ones that followed. It is about the grandmothers- mothers- daughters generation. There wasnt much premeditated thinking in the book, it just turned out this way. What is great is that we have those three long interviews, really long, five or six hours.”

Along modern history, women have been struggling to be recognized as fully equal in moral, intellectual, political, and civic terms. Romanian women, even the older ones, seem to have an innate civic spirit, according to Mihaela Miroiu:

“The political culture of these women passes with flying colors. They may not be sophisticated, but it is clear that they have the notion of interests that can be sorted out politically. It is very clear that, from their point of view, a democracy and a type of politics in which morality has vanished is not politics in the sense of the science and practice of living together, it has nothing to do with the common good. They would be quite at home in consolidated democracies, such as the Scandinavian ones. Their values, their ways of seeing politics, means politics of this sort.”

Field research in Sancrai, a Transylvanian village in the heart of Romania, provided the two authors the opportunity of getting to know the life stories of simple, yet extraordinary women.

“You can see their evolution, from near to far, irrespective of the fact that they are 80 year-old women from Sancrai that have four years of school, or city women, many of them physicians, teachers, engineers, highly qualified. They are extraordinarily similar in their aspirations, the types of issues they have, and they are very similar because they cannot stand the separation between the morality and the practice of politics. The book encourages that.”

The book was published in 2018 in the US, at Indiana University Press, and is now available in Romanian, published by Humanitas, in the Contemporary History collection, translated and adapted by Magda Dragu and Mihaela Miroiu:

“Of course we had to have a Romanian version, with fluently spoken Romanian, where you can have those interviews in the original. This is living language, it is interesting, and could not be very formalized. We did the research in Sancrai at a time when these retired grandmas were helping out their grandsons and granddaughters if they couldnt find jobs. This was before the exodus for foreign jobs was so intense. In fact, this is living history that they reflect on. Were not the ones talking about this history, they are, which is great. From their point of view, there is no such thing as citizenship aimed at rights without a citizenship of care. For them, the care element, as everyday ethics and practice, is part of the way in which they think about people.”

All those interested in the history of post-communist Europe should read the book The Birth of Democratic Citizenship: Women and Power in Modern Romania, authored by Maria Bucur and Mihaela Miroiu, which debates basic issues in Romania, but also in two other former communist countries, Poland and Hungary.

Tatiana Tibuleac has been decorated by Romanian President Klaus Iohannis with the Cultural Merit in rank of Knight, awarded to coincide with Romanias National Day. She was given the distinction in appreciation for her important activity in literary creation, and for the talent and professionalism she showed along her career, which gained her recognition at the European level. She is originally from the Republic of Moldova, and used to work as a journalist. In 2019, Tatiana Tibuleac was one of the 14 winners of the EU Prize for Literature, a prize given out in October 2019 in a ceremony at the Bozar Palace in Brussels. The Glass Garden, the novel that won Tatiana the award, is, according to critic Simona Sora, in several ways the novel of a whole generation of women, and of a storyteller that is as authentic as she is surprising. We met Tatiana at the conference The Power of Storytelling in October 2019, and talked to her about writing, about languages, about Chisinau, and about Paris, the city she calls home now. We also spoke to her about how the Romanian language has shaped her stories, about the ways in which her grandmother shaped her, and about resilience in the face of hardship. We also spoke about the controversies sparked by The Glass Garden, published in 2018, and about her native city of Chisinau, as well as about the award she got:

“The most emotional part regarding the EU prize for me was to read out loud in Romanian on the stage of Bozar Palace. This was really emotional for me, there were a lot of Romanians in the room, and I thought that the Romanian language, sounding loudly from that stage, was in fact the actual prize, for me personally. It seemed to me that everyone there, the writers who got prizes, gathered there to tell a story, and that Romanias voice sounded on an equal footing, and that was more emotional for me than the prize itself, and that was quite an unexpected surprise. I am trying to enjoy these awards, but I am getting back to work, which for me is writing.”

We started our discussion about languages with Tatiana Tibuleac starting from a fragment from The Glass Garden. She said her relationship with languages is tense, tight, unpredictable. Here is the fragment: There a street in Chisinau, the longest and most difficult street in the world. On that street, the buildings, trees, traffic lights, even the trash bins, even the holes in the road know Russian words.

Here is what she told us about this relationship:

“There are people who speak a single language very well, there are people who speak several languages poorly. I think I am part of that category of people who get by in more than one language. But when it comes to writing or using a language, it is the language that chooses them. At home I talk to my husband most of the time in English, and that is the language that allows me to talk about my daily life the best. Living in Paris, I hear a lot of French, my children prefer French to anything else, and it is a language I love mostly thanks to them, and I started to associate French with childhood and games. Russian, which I speak fairly well, means a lot to me, with it I connect to a literature that I like, and I also listen to music in Russian. At the same time, when I have to write something, Romanian is the language I choose, and which chooses me in turn. I realized that Romanian is the language with which I have a friendship relationship, and which I learn as I write it. For me, Romanian became even more dear to me after writing The Glass Garden. Because I revisited Chisinau, I revisited my childhood, the childhood backyard in which I spoke mostly Russian, I realized that in fact the Romanian language and I have known each other for a lot of years, and after this latest book, The Glass Garden, our friendship is even closer.”

Here is what Gabriela Adamesteanu wrote about the novel:

“Tatiana Tibuleac makes a powerful return, in another context and another level, to the theme of motherhood, of the loved/ unloved child, to the tragic consequences of unlove, of remorse, it is a book as wrenching as the novel The Summer When Mother Had Green Eyes. The orphan who discovers a multicultural Chisinau is adopted from a village orphanage by a single and ambitious woman, who wants to offer her a prosperous future. At the same time, it is possible that she buys herself workhands, exploiting her as mercilessly as they do in a Dickens novel. The questions haunt you after this riveting reading, this novel of becoming of a girl who grows up between two cultures and two languages, at a time of shifting frontiers and political systems.”

Here is what Tatiana Tibuleac said:

“I asked myself if the Glass Garden would be understood, if writers in Romania could connect to the realities of the Chisinau I describe, and fortunately they connected more than I could have hoped for. I was wondering why someone from France would read a story taking place in Chisinau, about a little girl who tries to learn Russian to the detriment of the Moldovan language, as it was called back then, which then turned to being called Romanian. Talking to the translator of the book, which comes out in France in March, I realized he found something very different in this book. He also told me that this fight for identity is not something too foreign, because many people find themselves in this struggle. I dont believe there is just one way of reading The Glass Garden.”