Radio România Internațional

Category: World of Culture

  • Radio Romania at the Gaudeamus Bookfair

    Radio Romania at the Gaudeamus Bookfair

    The
    29th edition of the GAUDEAMUS Bookfair was held over December 7 and
    11 in Bucharest’s Romexpo Exhibition Compound. After two years of going online,
    Romania’s most widely-read bookfair organized by the Romanian Radio Broadcasting
    Corporation returned to the format that has imposed it for almost thirty years
    now. At the recently-held edition of the Gaudeamus Bookfair in Bucharest more
    than 600 editorial events were ongoing as part of the fair. There were more
    than 200 participants who offered the reading public a very wide range of
    editorial products.


    Eli
    Badica is the coordinator of Nemira Publishers’ N’author collection. Diana
    Epure is Paralela 45 Publishers’ PR and the coordinator of the First Love
    collection. We invited them both in Radio Romania International studios. We had
    them speak about their publishing initiatives, specifically, about two of the
    projects that have succeeded to bring today’s Romanian literature in the
    spotlight. The First Love collection, coordinated by Diana Epure made its debut
    with five novels written by Romanian women and men writers, Diana Geacăr,
    Andrei Crăciun, Andrei Dosa, Alina Pietrăreanu and Cristina Ispas. The collection was launched at the summer edition of
    the Bookfest Bookfair. It is a contemporary
    Romanian literature collection targeting the young readership. It was available
    at the Gaudeamus Boookfair and recent releases will surely prolong its life. With
    details on that, here is Diana Epure.


    There is indeed a continuity, therefore, as part of the
    collection, a micro-novel by Stefan Manasia will be brought out, entitled The
    Sycamores of Samothraki. Ștefan Manasia is a Generation 2000 author, he is a very
    talented writer, he is a poet, an essayist and a prose writer, highly appreciated
    by the readers. The Sycamores of Samothraki is Ștefan Manasia’s second prose work
    and can be compared with art film for high-school students. It is about a boy
    who is initiated in his quest by his uncle, the boy is warm and open-hearted and
    all this warmth of the main character overflows in Stefan Manasia’s book which
    I don’t think high-school students cannot fall for it. As I’ve said many times
    before, I asked our writers to come up with a book for teenagers, a book they themselves
    wanted to have read in secondary school or in high school, but back in the day they
    didn’t have such a book. That’s how the First Love collection was started and
    it is true the writers tried their best and the micro novels that came out of
    their efforts were indeed extraordinary. That is the case of Stefan Manasia’s novel
    that was launched at the Gaudeamus Bookfair at the stand of our publishers. I
    should also like to say that at this edition of the Fair, the Paralela 45 Publishers
    had the largest stand ever to have hosted the publishers’ releases, since we
    wanted to have as comprehensive as possible a presentation of our publishing
    house. We promote all the facets of a
    publishing house for generations, just as we consider ourselves to be. And by that,
    I mean all the genres the Paralela 45 Publishing House is specialized in.


    Four years have passed since the Nemira Publishers has
    launched N’autor, a collectipon of contemporary Romanian literature, which reflects
    the world we live in, in a variety of ways. It is one of the most widely-read
    contemporary Romanian literature collections. The most recent release and the most eagerly-awaited is Florin Chirculescu’s The Necromancer. Here is the
    coordinator of N’Author, Eli Badica, speaking about the collection’s novelties.


    Florin
    Chirculescu’s book is, indeed, an event.
    It is a remarkable book in any respect, stylistically, but also plot-wise, since
    the central character is the towering figure of the most important Romanian
    poet,
    Mihai Eminescu. And
    also remarkable is the fact that it succeeds to render Mihai Eminescu more
    human. I do not know of any other such text, with such a wide scope, capable of
    depicting so convincing a portrait of Mihai Eminescu. It is an impressively well-documented
    book, whose underlying scholarship is tremendous, yet it is at once a book written
    with so much originality and so much humour. Now, returning to the N’Author’s
    recent releases, Raluca Nagy’s novel, A Horse in a Sea of Swans and Tales
    from the Garage by Goran Mrakić, these books happened to be
    brought out simultaneously, which reminds me of a tour we took in 2018, when we
    had these two authors travelling with us, after the aforementioned volumes had
    been launched. Actually, among the novelties you could access at Gaudeamus,
    there also was Goran Mrakić’s debut novel, Death’s petty Pleasures , brought
    out earlier this fall. It is a book where the author continues the literary mapping
    of Banat, something he had also dealt with in the previous volume. Also this past
    fall, Horea Sibișteanu’s first novel was brought out, a puzzle-novel. With this
    mosaic novel, Horea Sibișteanu has already seen his second book brought out as
    part of the N’autor collection. Entitled Hold Out Your Hand, Tiberiu, the novel’s
    central character is a young man in pursuit of his identity, nay, he is trying
    to come to terms with it. Also, he is trying to recompose his childhood of the
    1990s, from scattered pieces, also trying to understand himself in a
    present-time which is so very close to us. Also among the novelties there is the
    first novel of Liviu Ornea, whom everybody knows to be a mathematician, a translator,
    an academic, a researcher and a theater critic. After his debut with The
    Future in the Past, in 2022, this year he returned with Life as a Silly Joke,
    which is, like I said, his first novel.


    As an absolute first, on the premises at the fair and
    jointly with the partners of the recently-held edition Comic Opera for Children
    and the Versus Association, two areas were arranged, dedicated to interactive
    activities for the youngest visitors. The Mircea Nedelciu National Reading
    Contest, targeting the high-schools students, in 2022 unfolded in an original
    format, based on vide-cast essays. The theme of the contest was The Marin Preda
    Centennial. Commemorating 100 years since his birthday.(EN)



  • ‘Metronom (Metronome)’, the feature film debut of director Alexandru Belc

    ‘Metronom (Metronome)’, the feature film debut of director Alexandru Belc

    ‘Metronom’, the feature film debut of director Alexandru Belc, which received the Un Certain Regard Award for directing this year at the Cannes Film Festival, could be seen in cinemas across Romania since the beginning of November. After the film premiere at the opening of the program ‘Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest’, the film was screened in more than 45 cinemas in the country and the public had the opportunity to meet the films team after the screenings.



    The action of the film Metronom takes place in the 70s, when a group of high school students, fans of the rock music show Metronom aired by Radio Free Europe, write a letter to its producer, Cornel Chiriac. Things get complicated when Sorin, Anas boyfriend, gets the chance to leave the country for good with his whole family and the two lovers must separate. The cast includes Vlad Ivanov, Mihai Călin, Alex Conovaru, Alina Berzunţeanu, Mara Bugarin, Şerban Lazarovici, Mara Vicol, Marius Boboc, Mihnea Moldoveanu, Andrei Miercure, Măriuca Bosnea, Tiberiu Zavelea, Claudia Soare, Eduard Chimac, Briana Macovei, Pamela Iobaji, Ana Bodea, Alin Oprea, Alexandru Conovaru, Horatiu Bob, Alexandru Nedelcu, and Daniel Tomescu. We spoke with Mara Bugarin and Şerban Lazarovici about how they managed to impersonate teenagers from the communist period and about the challenge of playing the main roles in ‘Metronom’.



    Anas rebellious and equally romantic spirit won the actress Mara Bugarin over and she grew attached to the character she played: “It was quite difficult to understand Anas inner strength and the way it emerges and manifests itself in the context of a rather oppressive regime. I tried to connect with the character and not distance myself from it, given that Ana lives in the 70s and I was born much later. I didnt want to look at her as a character without substance or to judge her, to somehow consider myself better than her. That was the biggest difficulty about the role and equally the biggest challenge. It was difficult for me, but also very beautiful. The scenes at the Political Police headquarters were also very important for me, where I had as partners two of the best Romanian actors, Vlad Ivanov and Mihai Călin.”



    Next here is actor Şerban Lazarovici speaking about his role in Metronom: “I had fewer filming days than Mara and because I entered the project quite late, I had many discussions about the character and how it evolves with the director Alexandru Belc right on the set, before we started filming. These discussions helped me a lot and this is how I got into the atmosphere of the story, through long discussions that I had on the set with the small team of the film. Looking back, I can also talk about the things that make me different from Sorin, the character I played. Im sure that I wouldnt have reacted the way he did. It happened to me at certain Q & A sessions that people told me that I cant put myself in Sorins place, that I could not possibly know what I would have done if I was living during those times. However, I will stick to my opinion and say that I dont think I would have had his attitude towards the person I love, I dont think that I would have failed at least to warn her.”



    We also spoke with Mara Bugarin and Şerban Lazarovici, who play the main roles in Metronom, about the audiences reactions. Here is Mara Bugarin’s opinion. “For me, the reactions of the public are very relevant and important, and the words of the spectators move me and make me want to continue, to keep doing what Im doing. I realized that the film also has a kind of therapeutic effect, it so happened that the viewers confessed to us very intimate events that they experienced during communism. And its very exciting that people entrust you with such stories, you realize that just your mere presence in a film whose action takes place in a time that you did not even live in, helps and urges people to say things that they have probably never said.”



    Şerban Lazarovici believes that: “Indeed, the reaction of the public in Romania was very important for me too, especially because it is about a story that happened during communism. I was very curious to see how the public in Romania would react and what Mara said is true: at most of the screenings there are spectators who tell us about their experiences from their youth or adolescence, experiences lived during that period. And I find it very interesting that people have confidence in us, that their confidence is so great that they compare their own stories with what they saw in the film.”



    ‘Metronom’ was very well received by the specialized press. Variety considered it an intelligent and assumed tribute to a doomed generation of Romanians and noted that this stylized, slow and richly imaginative debut is much more than a Romanian version of the drama Romeo and Juliet. ‘Metronom’ is an exquisite piece of cinema, writes The Upcoming, and Cineuropa notes that in a film industry where filmmakers are rarely interested in female or young protagonists, the character Ana in Metronom becomes a true, shining symbol of a certain attitude towards life. (LS)

  • Art Cell – 5 years

    Art Cell – 5 years

    In the culture and arts space of Bucharest there is a different kind of art gallery: Art Cell (Celula de arta). It is an unconventional kind of art gallery, which celebrates its fifth year. It is a fish tank gallery facing to the street, which is meant to promote the artistic message in direct contact with the public, the passers-by. To quote the gallery manifesto, this allows art works to escape the classical space of a gallery to interact with a new audience, the part of the audience that does not usually go to art galleries or art events; it wants to establish a free, direct, and non-conformist dialog. We spoke to one of the co-founders of Art Cell, visual artist Daniel Loagar, about the history of the Cell, about how it all started 5 years ago, and about the concept of the team.



    “I should provide you with a bit of history, to be more explicit: the creation workshop I work in is in a culture hub in Bucharest, namely the Carol 53 hub. Various artisan artists have workshops here, they work and collaborate with other artisan artists in various areas — painting, photography, music, art using leather, metal, jewelry making, but some also restore classical bicycles. In the initial stage, Art Cell was born out of our need to express ourselves, and to show, to expose the public to what we are doing in the workshops. The gallery was set up by a group of artists, members of this hub, and in October 2017, on the White Night of Galleries, we opened officially the gallery, first with the exhibition Wood Be Nice, then the Night of Houses that same year, and we had our first performance, live painting. Shortly after, though, we realized that it is selfish to be the only ones that exhibit here, the ones in the hub. We realized that other artists want to join in, be present, to have exhibitions, and to manifest themselves through the gallery. This is how the Art Cell began, as it is known today to the public. The Art Cell is not a gallery in the classical sense of the word, for a few reasons. It is an artist run space, meaning that it is managed and organized by artists and friends, who dedicate part of their time pro bono to make it work. We have a team of people who do graphic design, social media, photo and video, web design, PR, and people who deal with logistics. We are not a large team, but we are trying to cover the whole range of needs that the gallery has. The Art Cell does not have a visiting schedule. Art objects can be seen right from the street, 24-7. Another reason for which we are not a classical type gallery is the audience of the gallery, which is very diverse. Our exhibits are consumed by both art lovers and friends of the artists, just like in a regular gallery, but also less informed people. Our exhibitions are being seen by regular passers-by, by students on their way to school, by elderly people on the way to market. Another reason to be for us, so to say, is that our gallery exhibits almost exclusively works seen for the first time, which we want very much. We want to have works made precisely for the 3-D space of the fish tank type, which our gallery is. We exhibit and promote emerging artists, who are just starting, who are still studying, or artists who have no formal training, artists who display for the first time, experimentalists, courageous artists. We want to have daring artists, artists who love a challenge, who want to collaborate, but also old time artists. We exhibit very diverse contemporary art: painting, sculpture, mixed media, installations, new media. We also host performance art, live painting, live music, interactive installations, or magazine launches.”




    We asked Daniel Loagar to make a summary of what happened in the 5 years of the gallerys existence:


    “Right now we have reached our 137th event, and probably one hundred artists on display. We dont have a precise count, but thats about right. Of the 137 events I would mention just a few. There would be Teodor Grigorass performance, who shut himself inside the Art Cell for 30 hours, time in which he painted 30 paintings. There was Dorin Cucicovs new media installations, an installation that took pictures of each passer by, integrating them into a virtual gallery. We had a manifesto exhibition in support of Ukraine, which we staged in King Michael Square in Bucharest this year. We had an exhibition in collaboration with the Art Mirror Association from Cluj, dedicated to the environment, held in Chisinau, Moldova. We had a live painting event, at the Vertical Gallery opening, where all artists painted blindfolded. We had a body drawing performance with a friend of ours from Ukraine. We had an ample project called IN-TO-IT, together with the Art Student Association, which included live music broadcast by IN-TO-IT radio, an exhibition for the fine art students, and an installation for design students. We had a manifesto exhibition, Bombs and People, against the war and in support of Ukraine, the first of its kind in Romania, curated by myself with a friend. I would also like to mention the new Art Cell spaces, namely the Kulterra Gallery Art Cell pop-up windows, a collaboration between our gallery and Kulterra, which started in April 2022. We also had the Vertical Gallery for the Cell, a new gallery with the Cell brand in the Random Space courtyard, a space for art consumption. The opening of the Vertical Gallery was in May 2022.”



    At the end of the discussion, artist Daniel Loagar told us what his wishes are for the Art Cell gallery for the next 5 years:


    “I say we will continue down the same path. We will try to bring out in the open as many brilliant and unknown artists as we can, to experiment, to play, to have performances.” (CC)

  • A trip down the memory lane

    A trip down the memory lane

    The Neamt National Museum Compound, located in
    the north-eastern Romanian town of Piatra-Neamt, over October 2022 and January
    2022 plays host to an exhibition dedicated to one of Romania’s all-time icons
    in terms of culture, history, academia and politics. The exhibition is themed Nicolae
    Iorga (1871-1940) and the commemoration of his 150th birthday anniversary.
    Nicolae Iorga was a historian, a literary critic, a documentarist, a poet, a
    writer of memoirs. Iorga a was also a minister, a parliamentarian, a
    prime-minister, a university professor and an academician. Part of Nicolae
    Iorga’s towering encyclopedic personality was captured by the aforementioned exhibition.
    About the exhibition and its capacity to illustrate the human side of Nicolae
    Iorga’s personality and about what we can find in the exhibition, here is
    researcher and exhibition curator Cristina Paiușan-Nuică.


    I need to say the exhibition is based on
    the Iorga-Pippidi Collection. And I also need to extend my thanks to
    professor Andrei Pippidi, Nicolae Iorga’s nephew. His mother, Mrs Liliana
    Iorga-Pippidi, was Nicolae Iorga’s daughter who donated an absolutely precious
    collection to the Romanian National History Museum, in an act of generosity
    that somehow comes in continuation to the acts of generosity made by the grandfather
    and, later, by professor Pippidi’s mother. Can you imagine we had
    Nicolae Iorga’s original birth certificate, we have his school diplomas with
    his primary school record, then the high-school one, then we have the university
    diploma, the Doctor’s diploma in Leipzig. We have family photos, we have photos
    with Nicolae Iorga and his 11 children, 4 of his first marriage with Maria Tasu
    and 7 of the marriage with Catinca Iorga. We have Catinca Iorga’s superb
    portrait made by Schweitzer-Cumpăna and restored here, in the museum. It was displayed
    for the first time in the exhibition in Bucharest and right now we can find it
    here in Piatra Neamt. We have, and the term is my coinage, some sort of mini-history
    of Europe made of the Doctor Honoris Causa diplomas and the distinctions Nicolae
    Iorga received throughout the years. As there are very few countries with which
    he had relationships and where he did not receive any recognition at all. For
    instance, he received a diploma of corresponding member of the Academy in Chile.
    As he was crossing the Ocean, Nicolae Iorga also made a journey through America
    and I think this is a very interesting topic, which needs to be further
    explored.


    What other noteworthy objects can be seen
    there? And what exactly does the showcase, specifically dedicated to the
    locality of Piatra Neamt as part of the exhibition, include, according to curator
    Cristina Paiușan?



    In the exhibition in Piatra-Neamț you
    can see all that. You can see some of Nicole Iorga’s personal items, objects
    that were donated to the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History and which we included
    in this exhibition For instance, the pen he wrote with, his glasses, a magnifying
    glass, a pen holder where he kept his stalks, personal letters, letters he
    received from great personalities. And, since Nicolae Iorga’s relation with
    Piatra-Neamt was good, he went places in the entire region a couple of times, he
    visited monasteries, he visited the town as such, me and my colleague Mihaela
    Verzea, who is also a deputy director of the museum in Piatra-Neamț, we had a
    small showcase made, focusing on Iorga and Piatra-Neamț. A showcase which has
    two extremely important pieces: there are two letters, one, received from Elena
    Cuza in 1909, the very year when Elena Cuza passed away. She retired in Piatra
    neamt, in the final years of her life, and looking after her was doctor Flor, the
    one who sent her the second letter, which actually goes with Elena Cuza’s
    letter. Elena Cuza thanked Nicolae Iorga in 1909 for everything he did for the Romanian
    nation and also thanked him for keeping the memory intact, of her husband, ruling
    prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza. It is a very interesting letter. The letter is accompanied
    by father Constantin Matasă’s calling card. He is the one who protected the
    monuments in Neamt and the one who had a close relationship with Nicolae Iorga,
    who was the president of the Historical Monuments Commission.


    Here is curator Cristina Paiușan once again, this time telling us something
    very personal about the exhibition.


    I, for
    one, hope that every one of those who will visit the exhibition will find something
    new about Nicolae
    Iorga, about Nicolae Iorga the man and about the relationship he had with his own
    children, whom he loved very much. A little bit about the relationship with, and
    the great love he had for his wife. And one of the most beautiful love letters
    that was kept is one of those Professor Pipidi published in Letters to Catinca,
    where Iorga the man, where enamoured Nicu wrote to a miss who was rather serious
    and who was still uncertain if she would link her life to that of the already
    famous Nicolae Iorga. We had the exhibition in Bucharest and now it is in
    Piatra Neamt and we hope to have it travel countrywide, and in each place, we
    should say something about Nicolae Iorga and that particular place. We hope it would bring a great scholar and a great
    man to the public’s attention yet again. We hope it would once again bring to
    the public’s attention the Romanian historiography and everything Nicolae Iorga
    meant for the Romanian historiography and for the Romanian people, since Nicolae Iorga was one of the founding
    fathers of unified Romania, and his role, I think, has remained crucial even to
    this day. And, when you want to find a topic or when you search a bibliography,
    you get hold of Iorga’s writings and say Let us see what he wrote many years
    ago? and then you start searching what has been written, since Iorga to the
    present, about that particular topic.

    (EN)



  • A fresh turn for children’s literature published in Romania

    A fresh turn for children’s literature published in Romania


    The Fairy-Tale Association of Writers for children and teenagers is a professional association. It was established in 2018 and it seeks to promote contemporary Romanian literature for children. The Association also supports creators and facilitates the access of children coming from underprivileged families to books and tales. Due to the numerous ongoing projects, thousands of children and youngsters had the chance to meet their favorite writers and their works, in libraries, schools, museums, community centers or bookfairs and festivals. Each year, the Fairly Tale writers travel to villages and underprivileged communities, in a bid to meet children there, staging creative workshops and making book donations as part of the Fairy Tale Caravans. The LittleLit Festival the Association has organized connects literature for children written in Romania to the international one, while the educational resources the Fairy Tale writers create support pupils, teachers and librarians. This year, the Fairy-Tale Association has held a series of educational workshops which promoted friendship, inclusion, diversity and tolerance. The workshops have been tailored for children aged 6 to 20, living in several rural localities across Romania. The workshops are part of the project Play Your Book! which kicked off with a book-raising campaign. We sat down and spoke to one of the founders of Fairy Tale Association, writer Victoria Pătrașcu, about the role of the Association and about the workshops held this year.



    Victoria Patrascu:



    “Fairy-Tale, the Association of writers for childrens and teenager books is an association which, ever since it has come into being, in 2018, has sought to support creators of literature for children in Romania and, especially, to facilitate the access of children, and mainly those living in underprivileged areas, to contemporary literature for children. We shall not refrain from admitting that quite a few of the communal libraries have an outdated or a limited amount of book supply, and the children living there do not get round to reading contemporary stories, that is why they do not find themselves in the literature they read. Obviously, they also do not have the chance to meet writers of contemporary literature. On a number of occasions we found out those children had been literally taken aback by the fact that we, the writers, were alive and kicking, we were living human beings, we were writers of our time. Every time we went there, our encounters with those children are extraordinary, and in the long run they are impressed with the tales we tell, thereby discovering how exactly they can tackle literature. Our project, Play your Book!, one of the most recent ones, starting off from the tales, seeks to enable us to play and learn at the same time. I held workshops in two localities in Dambovita County, in Conțești and Titu. The meeting we had in Conțești was extraordinary. There is also a community of traditional Rroma population and I interacted with a great many Rroma children who came to the library for the first time, and on that occasion they discovered that fabulous world of books, of stories or drawings, many even got an access pass for the library, and we were brimming with joy because of that. Allow me to also mention the fact that we were not alone in our undertaking, we had two extraordinary partners, namely EduCab, the Communal Libraries Network and the Arthur Publishers, the one who helped us take new books to those places and reshuffle the already outdated book supply we found there.”



    “Play your Book !” continued with the work on a pedagogical kit, prepared by the women members of the Fairy Tales Association. It is an important project, meant to offer educators and librarians alternative methods to explore the stories which as part of childrens literature. Through this pedagogical kit that will be given out to a great many librarians, teachers, primary school teachers and cultural educators, the project caters for the dissemination of the European values and encourages critical thinking in as many communities as possible across the country.



    One of the women writers, founders of the Fairy Tale Association, Victoria Pătrașcu, is a writer of books and plays for children. Victoria Patrascu had her debut with The Day Sleep Ran Away, brought out by the Nemi Publishers in 2008 and the Book for Children Publishers, 2017, the book that enjoyed a real success, being subsequently turned into a stage play, featuring the Momolino troupe, or into a radio drama, as a Radio Romania production. In 2012, Victoria Patrascu published an anthology titled The Dwarf Oak Tree, the Best Father that Can Be, brought out by the Childrens Book Publishers. The book was a finalist as part of the Ready for Press Gala. In 2013, The Oak Tree, the Best Father that Can Be was turned into a radio play and broadcast by Radio Romanias National Radio Drama Desk. In 2017, the volume was awarded the Excellence Prize for Childrens Literature, awarded by the Itsy Bitsy Radio Channel. Other books for children followed. Aaaaa Love Story and the Little Notes Chance, brought out by Cartier Publishers, TiriBomBamBura, Five Rolling Stories, brought out by the Guthenberg Books Publishers, Letters from Lapona, Zuralo and the Charmed Little Wheel, Zuralis Song, Gaston Tomberon, the hero of Acheron, The Untamed Women, A Recipe for Courage, Ariadnas Amazing Journeys. Victoria Patrascu is also the author of The Little Pretzels Adventures, brought out by the Univers Publishers and The Dragon Number 32.



    With details on her writers undertaking, here is Victoria Pătrașcu herself.



    “I have been trying hard that, apart from the activities I am involved in, with the Fairy Tale Association, I should find time for myself to write. The most recent story I wrote is The Dragon number 32, it saw a rather belated launch as part of this years edition of the Bookfest Bookfair in Bucharest and I was very happy when, yet again, I had a face-to-face meeting with the children. It is the story of a streetcar, rolling from the city center to the outskirts and somehow connecting the two worlds. It is a streetcar where little girl equally discovered the real and the fantastic Bucharest, since many times, children, when they look out the window, can see more things that we, the adults, can see. It is a story inspired by my daughter and by the rides I took to her school, by the people I met for many years, in streetcar 32. From that streetcar, connecting Rahova to the city center, I saw so many derelict yet still beautiful buildings, blocks of flats looking like bedrooms or giants, for the little girls in the story. It is a very touching story, also speaking about the homeless people who sometimes live in the belly of Dragon number 32, a story that can open many debates with the readers, a book that was sensationally illustrated by Mihaela Paraschivu.”(EN)






  • “Shaving the Caterpillar”

    “Shaving the Caterpillar”

    Between mid-October and mid-November, the Mobius Gallery in Bucharest,
    one of the most important places in the city that bring contemporary art closer
    to the public, is hosting an exhibition by Ileana Pașcalău, entitled Shaving
    the Caterpillar. The artist was born in Caransebeș (western Romania), and she is now living and working in Berlin. Ileana Pașcalău is a visual artist and an
    art historian, and her current exhibition brings together art and the
    theoretical investigation of the history of the human body, particularly the
    female body:


    Ileana Pașcalău: Shaving the Caterpillar is the name of the exhibition I put
    together jointly with the curator Valentina Iancu, at the invitation of Mobius
    Gallery. The exhibition is designed as a journey into the history of the female
    body, from a medical perpective. The project is based on a broader research
    effort that I embarked upon in 2017, when I was looking for a topic for my
    Ph.D. thesis. So it all started from a theoretical investigation that spanned
    several years and focused on the anatomy of women as seen by physicians, mainly
    men, between the 17th and the 19th Centuries. I would
    also like to emphasise the importance of my family background in the
    development of these ideas. I grew up in a family in which my mother, an
    internist, used to give me all sorts of medical instruments and accessories to
    play with, instead of toys. My grandmothers, who were OB-GYN nurses, somehow
    kindled my interest in the female anatomy and this curiosity of looking at it
    from an artistic perspective as well.


    Ileana Pașcalău also went on to tell us about her creative process, and
    about the questions she set out to answer or to encourage the public to ask when
    visiting the exhibition:


    Ileana Pașcalău: My works shed light on stories that are rather painful. My
    creative process is based on signifying the often shocking or distressing
    information discovered during the research, information which may be once again
    traumatising for the public if it were displayed as such. But far from being a
    scientific, medical, psychiatric type of research, mine is an artistic research
    into the history of this topic, and is not intended as a comprehensive investigation.
    Rather, I would hope the visitors’ experience to be similar to touching a large
    scar. In other words, I would like people to be encouraged to ask questions and
    to seek answers: what happened, along the centuries, with the construction of
    the female anatomy by male physicians? How painful have those medical theories
    been for women? What were the consequences of these theories? Is this scar
    healed? What is left of it today? Even this common saying about a woman being
    hysterical is a 19th Century fiction. So when using this word
    again, we should keep in mind that this concept was an instrument of
    manipulation and torture. And not least, I would like visitors to ask
    themselves, how do we avoid this kind of injuries and scars, what do we learn
    from them, how do we become stronger?


    At the end of our discussion, Ileana Pașcalău told us about the
    materials used in her works, and the route she created for the exhibition
    visitors:


    Ileana Pașcalău: A first narrative in the exhibition
    focuses on the question, How was the second sex born? And in a first stage of
    the exhibition, we have drawings that suggest the medical writings and
    illustrations in 17th and 18th Century scientific
    treatises. These drawings outline a history of the female anatomy, marked by
    physicians’ obsessions with the female reproductive system. So the exhibition
    viewing direction is first designed to show how physicians constructed the
    female anatomic image starting from the uterus, which was seen as the main
    marker of the differences between the two sexes. But more than a marker, the
    uterus was seen as an unpredictable, dangerous organ, able to cause insanity
    and major behavioural deviations. In a second stage, the exhibition looks at
    the Enlightenment, the period that brought us the first image of a female
    skeleton. This is when the second sex also gets its own spine and thorax. It is
    an important moment, which I illustrated with installations made of artificial
    skin and metal. Leather, skin, with its organic connotations, is a material
    with which I worked specifically for this exhibition, I cut, pierced and glued
    together layers of skin, just like a surgeon. Hence this parallel I had in mind
    throughout my artistic effort, that the artist works in similar ways as a
    doctor. And finally, the climax of the exhibition is the concept of hysteria,
    which is a construct, a fiction. If there is anything I would love the public
    to take home from this exhibition, this would be it: people should stop using
    the word hysteria altogether. (AMP)

  • Modern art takes a new turn, in Romania

    Modern art takes a new turn, in Romania


    ARCUB, the
    acronym of Bucharest’s Cultural Centre, jointly with the Romanian Fine Artists Union
    have recently brought ot the attention of art lovers anew edition of a project
    themed Arts in Bucharest. This years the project title was Deco ReMake, a
    plethora of exhibitions, workshops, conferences and masterclasses, all focusing
    on decorative arts. A 360-degree view of the decorative arts, from the perspective
    of curatorial concepts and contemporary artistic practices. The Deco ReMake
    project has been structured around several central exhibitions mounted in
    various dedicated areas around the capital city. The project took shape out of
    the wish to educate the lay public, at once getting it acquainted with
    techniques and specific procedures used in the manufacturing of decorative art
    objects. We sat down and spoke with the Deco Remake’s general coordinator, Dorina
    Horătău. She gave us details about how the project came into being, about
    its directions and about the organizing team.


    Arts in Bucharest has now seen its 9th edition, an edition
    dedicated to the decorative arts. We have been making our research for the titles,
    and, of the shortlisted titles we came up with, we opted for Deco ReMake, which,
    for me, is an appropriate label for resetting, an updating of the decorative earts,
    that is. In what specific way? The major arts borrow a great deal from the
    decorative artist’s basic techniques, yet they restructure them according to
    several principles of contemporary art and, furthermore, according to a concept.
    A great many of the artists activating in the area of the decorative arts find
    it rather hard to overcome that barrier of a message capable of getting deeply involved
    in what happens in the present-day world. In the previous editions, the decorative
    arts were embedded in the major arts, they were less powerful. In a project,
    you lay things, you build, you get results, there is an impact for the others. Apart
    from the exhibitions, we wanted the decorative artists to go public, so that
    they can show everyone how they actually make those objects, those works and what
    the underlying technology was. We have some recipes. It is important how you
    use all those recipes and formulas for the materials you have and how you convey
    the message you, as an artist, have, into a shape that transmits something, so
    that everything turns into a on object with a message. Oftentimes you pursue,
    and there is glaring evidence of that kind of pursuit, the intention of focusing
    on the connection with the conceptual and with the dialogue with the public,
    meaning you want to incite, to make things more problematic. This year, the
    work we had was tremendous, for the production of the exhibitions, we did that
    with the general curator Ana Negoiță, Georgiana Cozma and Marian Gheorghe. It
    is high time a dialogue took place, between what happens to the youngsters and
    the old guard.


    Here is
    general curator, Ana Negoiță, giving us details on the artistic concepts and
    criteria that generated Deco ReMake:


    There are two oddities in this project, oddities we accept since we’ve grown accustomed to taking the
    rough with the smooth, which means that ours is a project that did not start off
    from a curatorial concept, with the works revolving around a particular concept,
    just as it happens very often, which is common practice, instead, it started
    off from an organizing project, a project that got the branch closer together,
    the Decorative Arts Branch, which means textiles, glass, metal, ceramic, in a bid
    to get those people closer together, through a discourse that needed to be
    said. And it is here that the curatorial team plays its part, as it is not
    myself alone, all of us, at one point, took the responsibility of such a role
    and it was a dialogue, it was interdisciplinary work, since I hail from the theoretical
    perspective, my colleagues have the practical perspective as well as that of
    the practicing artist, so we had to get all those objects together, with no
    curatorial criteria whatsoever, which is in no way easy, mounting an exhibition
    with no curatorial standards, conceptually speaking, so that they, together,
    can have a unitary discourse. And the running thread was for us to pursue that
    in every dedicated area, to give a contemporary touch to decorative arts, since
    it is very important, we’re still fighting for the decorative arts a little bit,
    they have static dimension so they need to be taken to object installations and
    to interdisciplinary structures within the decorative arts, meaning they no
    longer are just textile or metal, the mixed techniques translate into a certain
    perspective on the object from the viewpoint of the installation, and even into
    a performative structure, just as the video area is. Which is very important, and
    in no way easy to integrate that kind of discourse into a generation of seniors.


    Last but
    not the least, the Fine Artists Union’s President, Petru Lucaci, shared his
    opinion with us, on the Deco ReMake project.


    It is a project we initiated many years ago and which has already seen several
    editions that were carried against various backdrops and in various locations.
    We have been trying to widen our interest area in as many domains as possible,
    since the Fine Artists’ Union, apart from the fact that it has more than 6,000 members,
    it also has, like, 10 different career paths, departments trying to promote
    their image and promote their activity as well. This time we have tried to prioritize
    the decorative arts, not only because the domain has become a major art area.
    It is an innovative register, it is welcomed, in the long run rounding off the contemporary
    art scene with significant stuff. As we speak, the decorative arts section looks
    perfect to a fault. The picture rail is a museum rail, it has bene renewed, it
    is an area where each and every work is capitalized on and the relationship between
    them is expressive and interesting, it is provoking. The Fine Artists’ Union
    has a tremendous potential, it has so many members who are very interesting, as
    distinct individuals. Yet it is more difficult to get them together and create
    events capable of supporting them in every respect, and also from this
    curatorial perspective. It is an exemplary pattern of behavior. As of late, in
    recent years, we have been trying to hang on to that particular type of visual discourse.
    That is how they can put an elevated exhibition area together, an area of
    interest, capable of truly emphasizing something on Romania’s contemporary art
    scene.(EN)




  • Iaşi International Literature and Translation Festival

    Iaşi International Literature and Translation Festival


    More
    than 200 professionals from the world of literature and the arts from
    Finland, France, Germany, Israel, the Republic of Moldova, Rwanda,
    Algeria, Syria and Romania are taking part in the Iaşi International
    Literature and Translation Festival – FILIT, held between the 19th
    and the 23rd
    of October.







    Like
    in previous editions, readers again have the chance to meet
    award-winning writers and important contemporary literary voices from
    Romania and abroad such as the author of the best-selling title The
    Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the Irish writer whose works have been
    translated into 58 different languages John Boyne, one of the
    best-known and most award-winning Spanish writers Manuel Vilas,
    Algerian author writing in French Boualem Sansal, Armenian writer
    Narine
    Abgaryan, who was named by The
    Guardian among the best authors of contemporary Europe and whose book
    Three
    Apples Fell from the Sky
    was a best-selling title, and the Romanian writer and philosopher
    Andrei Pleșu. The festival is hosting dozens of events, including
    meetings with authors, poetry and book readings late into the night,
    workshops and roundtable discussions for professionals as well as
    concerts.







    In
    the run-up to the festival, the FILIT Workshops for translators were
    held between 3rd
    and 7th
    October by the National Museum of Literature in Iaşi together with
    the Ipoteşti Memorial House – the Mihai Eminescu National Centre
    for Studies. The workshops provided a framework for professional
    training and discussion for translators from the Romanian into
    foreign languages and saw guests from ten countries: Jale Ismayil
    from Azerbaijan, Monica Constandache from Switzerland, Alexey Kubanov
    from Kazakhstan, Joanna Kornás-Warwas from Poland, Ferenc André and
    Csanád Száva, from Romania and translating into Hungarian, Monica
    Cure from the US and Eliza Filimon, a Romanian translator into
    English, Roxana Ilie, Romanian translator into German, Đura
    Miočinović from Serbia, Klara Rus from Slovenia, Elena Borrás from
    Spain, and Gabriella Koszta from Hungary.







    We
    talked to writer and member of the festival’s team Florin Lăzărescu
    about the importance given by the festival to translators and the
    festival’s relevance for the Romanian public:







    This
    is why we named our festival the International Literature and
    Translation Festival, because we give special attention to
    translators, especially translators from the Romanian into a foreign
    language. Apart from these workshops, the festival also features
    other events centred on translators, from professional meetings with
    literary agents and translators to translation workshops for high
    school pupils. Translators go to high schools and teach pupils how to
    make a literary translation. As for the festival’s public, 80% of
    participants are young and very young and I’m glad our festival
    means something
    to them. I’ll give you two examples. Gabriela Vieru is a well-known
    literary critic and a member of Timpul
    magazine. She has attended the festival every year, has even worked
    as a volunteer in past editions, and this year she is coordinating
    two events. She told me this festival was the first time in her life
    she met actual writers, when she was in her 9th
    year in school. I think that’s extraordinary how her life since she
    was a teenager has been marked by the festival. And she is not the
    only example. Ioan Coroamă, who is invited as a guest this year, is
    considered one of the most exciting new voices in Romanian poetry.
    When I invited him to take part, he said he’s been coming to the
    festival since he was in 6th
    form and that the festival was very important for him, he grew up
    with the festival. These meetings with writers I think are very
    important, especially for young readers. This year, the festival’s
    guests are going to 18 different high schools in Iași and other
    places around the county. This includes not just writers, but also
    translators and other professionals from the literary industry. I
    think this is one of the most important achievements of the festival,
    namely changing how literature is perceived, showing that it can also
    be spectacular, interesting, and very much alive.







    This
    year’s International Literature and Translation Festival in Iasi is
    hosting Romanian novelists Cezar
    Amariei, Remus Boldea, Adrian Cioroianu, Bogdan Coșa, Filip Florian,
    Lavinica Mitu, Liviu Ornea, Ioana Pârvulescu, Dan Perșa, Bogdan
    Suceavă, Anca Vieru; Romanian poets Răzvan Andrei, Ion Buzu, Ioan
    Coroamă, Teona Galgoțiu, Anastasia Gavrilovici, Sorin Gherguț,
    Claudiu Komartin, Ileana Negrea, Cătălina Stanislav, Veronica
    Ștefăneț and Mihók Tamás. Casa Fantasy hosts events focusing on
    the writers O.G. Arion, Michael Haulică, Liviu Surugiu, Daniel
    Timariu and Marian Truță and Casa Copilăriei is hosting
    illustrators Sidonia Călin and authors Ioan Mihai Cochinescu, Simona
    Epure, Iulia Iordan and Radu Țuculescu. The journalist Elena Stancu
    and photographer Cosmin Bumbuț are the guests of special events, and
    the photographer Mircea Struțeanu is presenting a literary and
    artistic project. (CM)

  • Animest International Animated Film Festival

    Animest International Animated Film Festival

    An event devoted to animated film, Animest is the place where the most important international productions released in the last year have a first meeting with the Romanian public. This year’s edition, the 17th, took place in Bucharest between October 7 and 16, and included more than 340 films, among which animated films that won prizes at major international cinematographic events.



    Here is Mihai Mitrică, the director of Animest, with details: It is a come-back edition, after 2 years of pandemic. But the Animest Festival did not stop even during the pandemic. We organised an online-only edition and a hybrid edition. Last year we screened films in one cinema hall, but this year we are screening films in more than 5 locations. Its not an accident, after these two years of pandemic, that we chose love as the theme of this edition. We have a lot of love stories in the program: animated and very colourful, of course. In this edition, the international feature film competition brings together exceptional stories that will convince even the most hard-to-impress viewers. Im talking about five films. One of the films is produced in Japan, another one is a Japan-France co-production, we also have, among others, a film from Portugal, which is called Nayola. Portugal is the guest country at this years festival, so we will have a lot of Portuguese films. In the international feature film competition, we also have a Lithuanian-American film, a beautiful love story. It is very interesting that two of the five films in the international competition have war as their topic, but the way war is presented or the way the subject is approached is very original. Although they are films about war, they have colour and humour. As a conclusion, I would say that that the pandemic seems to have worked in favour of love, so to speak. As we can see in the Animest festivals schedule this year, it seems that people had more time to think, to devote more time to their loved ones, and this is indeed reflected in the productions that we have received.



    One of the 49 short films selected in the International Competition will go home with the 2022 Animest Trophy, which will automatically give it a place on the list of eligible candidates for an Academy Award nomination, granted by the American Film Academy. Among these films there are two Romanian productions: Suruaika, a film by Vlad Ilicevici and Radu C. Pop, in which a cat ends up having all the power, and Sasha (directed by Serghei Chiviriga), about a teenager who gets to discover the truth about his own sexual identity in a strange way.



    Mihai Mitrică: “Romanian films are no exception, in terms of quality and diversity. And this year weve received more submissions than ever. This is another conclusion that I have reached, namely that these 2 years of pandemic left a mark on productions, whose number has increased. Another notable thing is that most of the Romanian works submitted and selected this year into the competition are longer. There are 9 or 12-minute films, but there are also 15-minute ones. As a rule, in previous years the average length of a Romanian production was 4 minutes, with just a handful of 9-minute films. This tells me that artists had more time to work on their films and found stories they could tell in 12 minutes or more. As regards quality, it has improved from one year to the next, with few exceptions.



    Those interested in exploring new views in animation will appreciate the short films submitted in the Student Film Competition, and coming from the most prestigious animation schools in the world. Animest International Animated Film Festival is the only one in Romania devoted exclusively to animation. Founded in 2006, the festival screens hundreds of works from around the world in 6 competition categories, special programmes devoted to famous animation schools, to relevant festivals, to major names in the industry. Every October, Bucharest hosts film directors, producers, students, curators and journalists, who take part in Q&A sessions, film premieres, workshops and master-classes.



    One of the most important missions of the festival is to revive and promote Romanian animation. The local competition section of the festival has grown since its launch in 2007. The new generation, who took part in the Animest workshops, are already animation professionals in the country or students in leading European universities. In recent years, Romanian animated films have been selected in and awarded at important international festivals. Animest organises screenings in various cities in Romania, curates film selections in international festivals, and Animest Chișinău has been a regular annual event since 2011. (LS&AMP)

  • National Radio Theatre productions were in competition for Prix Italia award

    National Radio Theatre productions were in competition for Prix Italia award


    Two National Radio Theatre productions, The 1960s by Ema Stere and directed by Mihnea Chelaru and Solaris based on Stanisław Lem and adapted and staged by Ilinca Stihi were in the Radio Drama competition for the prestigious Prix Italia award dedicated to media productions. This year’s competition saw a record number of 321 entries in the three categories, radio, tv and web, of which 94 in the radio section, from 83 public radio stations from 50 different countries around the world.



    Ilinca Stihi, the creator of Solaris, based on Stanisław Lem, studied film directing at the Bucharest theatre and film academy and has been working for the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation since 2005. In 2013, together with Atila Vizauer, the editor-in-chief of the drama department, and Mihnea Chelaru, a sound engineer with this department, she initiated Grand Prix Nova, Romania’s first independent radio drama festival. She is the winner of 7 international awards and of the Romanian Theatre Union award for best radio drama production in 2013. She was on the jury at the International Radio Festival in New York in 2013 and president of the radio drama jury of the Prix Marulic Festival in Croatia in 2014.



    A director and script writer, she creates the entire show, even when working with an existing script, doing everything, from the script to sound post-production, to the depth of the layers of sound. She often uses literary sources as a pretext for a reinterpretation that retains the initial themes, but which goes beyond the frames of the original text, as if part of an intricate architecture of sound, is how critic Oana Cristea Grigorescu described Ilinca Stihi.



    In choosing the theme of her radio plays, Stihi says she is interested in topical subjects:



    Solaris was an encounter I did not dare hope for. Everyone knows Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, the film Solaris. Many are also perhaps familiar with Stanisław Lem’s novel, an extraordinarily complex work which mainly speaks of the human condition, despite being a work of science fiction. I have to say that for a while I didn’t dare approach it. It’s very difficult to come up with your own version when great artists have already expressed their visions about this story. But then I got a proposal from the Polish Institute, via the producer of the play, Oana Cristea Grigorescu, and I thought about their invitation, I took it as a sign, I thought it was worth a try.



    Indeed, the encounter, or rather the re-encounter, with Solaris after the difficult experience of the pandemic was of great impact. Ilinca Stihi: “To me Solaris is a story of seclusion, because is about people blocked on a spaceship, in a non-human universe, who are forced to reflect on their condition. We were somehow in a similar situation almost two years, and I thought it was important to think about what we lived, to try to discover, beyond the historical meaning, the meaning that this event had in our lives. This is the starting idea of Solaris. I tried to create a free adaptation and took the liberty to write a part of it myself. A contemporary part, a part linked to the present, adding to the novels complex message and the spectacular descriptions, some of them cited by me in the radio drama. This is how the Solaris project took shape and then developed beautifully, due to the collaboration with composer Cristian Lolea, who signs the original music, and with sound designer Tom Brandus. I translated the fragments from the novel together with Sabra Daici. The novel had been translated in the 1990s, in a manned that now sounds somehow old, given the huge advance of technology in the past 20 years. I hope we managed to create not only a coherent but also an expressive universe of the present moment. I would like to mention that the show is aimed to be also accessible to those who are not familiar with the text of Stanislaw Lem.



    The cast includes Tudor Aron Istodor, Mădălina Anea, Emilian Oprea, Gabriel Costin, Radu Bânzaru, Marcela Roibu and Costin Toma Dârțu. Its producers are Radio România and the Polish Institute in Bucharest, in partnership with Romanias National Museum of Art.


    Ilinca Stihi also told us about the importance of the selection to Prix Italia: Prix Italia is the oldest radio festival in Europe and the world, because Europe has the longest tradition in this respect. It is a great honor and joy to join colleagues from all over the world who present their work and listen to each other. To us, who are passionate about radio drama, the great joy of these festivals is the fact that we can listen to each others work and exchange ideas and perspectives at a time when sound art is revived all across Europe. We all know that podcasts and everything related to sound enjoy record audiences online, so everybody is trying to find new ways to communicate with the listeners.



    The 1960s by Ema Stere, directed by Mihnea Chelaru and Solaris after Stanisław Lem, adapted and directed by Ilinca Stihi, the two radio dramas selected in the official competition of Prix Italia, can be listened to on the platform e-teatru.ro.






  • The 10th edition of Art Safari

    The 10th edition of Art Safari


    The 10th edition of the famous art exhibition Art Safari opened on September 22 at the Dacia-Romania Palace in the Bucharest old town. A total of 5 exhibitions can be visited until December 11, 2022. This year, organizers have prepared a journey into the works of John Constable (1776-1837), a British Romantic painter and a pioneer of landscape painting, one of the most celebrated British classical painters. Korean art is also represented by a series of spectacular posters. And of course, theres a pavilion of Romanian art, featuring Ștefan Popescu (1972-1948), painter, sketcher and engraver, as well as the young Cluj-based artist Mihai Mureșan, an urban landscape painter. We spoke to Art Safari director, Ioana Ciocan, about the highlights of this years edition:




    “I would wholeheartedly recommend the collection of the great Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the most important museums in the world, which is on display here, at the Dacia-Romania Palace in Bucharest. The exhibition is devoted to John Constable, who is a sort of British version of Grigorescu. It is an impressive collection, which first and foremost stands out through the value of the works on display and particularly familiar sense we all get when we enter the worlds biggest museums. A great museum in the heart of the capital-city, made possible through a partnership struck with Victoria and Albert on the sidelines of Art Safari. Of course, apart from the John Constable exhibition, theres also the exhibition devoted to Ștefan Popescu, organized in partnership with the Bucharest City Hall Museum, which features a painter, an artist, an engraver who scooped numerous prizes in France as well as Romania, presented to the public as a travelling painter. The exhibition includes works the artist created in Romania, France, Italy, Morocco, Albania and Egypt, since Popescu painted wherever he travelled. He was in fact the only Romanian to take part in the Venice Biennial three times. I would like the name Popescu, which is a common Romanian surname, to be henceforth associated with fine art as well. And let us not forget the exhibition devoted to Lilian Theil, a remarkable artist born in 1932 in Brașov, who is a needle painter using the appliqué technique to create very impressive embroideries. Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu is the curator of this exhibition that captures the highlights of recent history, including the pandemic, funerals, weddings, turbulent marriages, love stories, erotic scenes, basically every human experience is transparent in her works. We also have an exhibition devoted to Mihai Mureșan, an artist based in Cluj. The exhibition is curated by Prof. Ioan Sbârciu. The Cluj school of art needs no further introduction, as it helped train some of the superstars of the last 20 years. Prof. Sbârciu this morning told me that Mihai Mureșan will be the next name on this list”.




    How difficult was it to organize such a complex exhibition against a very turbulent contemporary background, ridden with conflicts, cancelled flights and an uncertain economic context?




    “It was a very tough job, but weve spent years negotiating this contract. Of course, this was also made possible with the help of the British Embassy in Romania and our entire team, who wanted to get this great museum to Romania. So I hope that everyone who is a fan of Constable, and I mean Europeans in general, should get on a plane and come to Bucharest and see his exhibition”.




    Coming back to the 2022 Art Safari, director Ioana Ciocan spoke about the Korean exhibition, which may come as a surprise for local art lovers.




    “South Korea is represented with a special exhibition at Art Safari, a collection of posters inspired by the Korean script. Its a very colorful and vibrant collection and involves a tremendous amount of work. The artist is Byoungil Sun, an internationally acclaimed artist, who will actually come to Bucharest for a series of workshops addressing fine arts students from all over the country. And theres more. We also have contemporary art installations created by Mihai Mureșan. Theres one set up in the central lobby, and one on the second floor, as part of his private exhibition. And since this is an Art Safari, of course there is a jungle involved”.




    At the end of our talk with Ioana Ciocan, the director of Art Safari also had a few recommendations for us:




    “This year as well we have divided the exhibition in two. Theres an international pavilion comprising two exhibitions, and then theres the national pavilion which consists of three exhibitions. So we suggest art lovers should make several visits to see Art Safari. If I were to pick three works of art, I would choose Leaping Horse from Victoria and Albert, then the Byoungil Sun poster and a 1502 engraving by Dürer that inspired John Constable. And I would also pick a Rembrandt, a representation of a famous tree that also inspired Constables landscapes. So theres a lot to see in Bucharest, works by Constable, but also Gainsborough, Turner, Rembrandt and Dürer”. (VP)




  • Actress  Ioana Bugarin

    Actress  Ioana Bugarin

    Last year, on the stage of TIFF (Transylvania International Film Festival), the actress Ioana Bugarin was awarded the Alex. Leo Șerban scholarship for the roles in the films Mia misses her revenge (directed by Bogdan Theodor Olteanu) and Otto the Barbarian (directed by Ruxandra Ghițescu). This year, at the Gopo Awards, Ioana Bugarin was nominated twice for her roles in the same films: for the role of Mia in the film Mia misses her revenge, she was nominated for the category of best actress in a leading role, and for the role of Laura in the film Otto the Barbarian, in the best supporting actress category.



    Also this year, Ioana Bugarin returned to the big screen, playing the main role in the film Miracle, directed by Bogdan George Apetri, winner of the Award for the best feature film at TIFF, in the Romanian Film Days section, and praised in the American press after its release. Ioana Bugarin also impressed thanks to her performance in the recently released HBO series, RUXX. At only 25 years old, Ioana Bugarin has a career in cinematography, but she can also be seen on stage, at the Odeon Theatre, where she was hired after playing the role of Ophelia in the play Hamlet, directed by Dragoș Galgoțiu.



    At the Odeon Theatre, Ioana Bugarin also played roles in Juliet without Romeo, directed by Bogdan Teodor Olteanu, Henry IV, directed by Vlad Cristache and Persona by Radu Nica. The successful international co-production Itineraries. One day, the world will change, directed by Eugen Jebeleanu, whose cast includes Ioana Bugarin, was awarded the UNITER 2020 award for best director and declared by Romanian theater critics the show of the year 2019.



    We spoke to Ioana Bugarin about her most recent roles, the role played by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in her formation and how she chooses her projects. We also talked about the awards received, always pleasant, but never an end in itself. An emotional moment, says the actress, was last year, when at TIFF she was awarded the Alex. Leo Şerban scholarship, initiated in memory of one of the most appreciated film critics in our country.



    It was a great honor, I hadn’t expected it at all. I remember even now, the organizers of the TIFF Gala sending me this invitation to participate, and me telling them I had no reason to go. They kept sending me messages and reiterating the invitation, and I would reply the same, that I had no reason to come to the Gala. But when I got there things started to happen. But I never focused on that, I never made it a goal to win awards. Not when I started my career, not when I chose a project. I want to say that for me the most important thing has always been to find the right roles, that would represent and incite me. Of course, every human being needs validation, and when you get it, it’s wonderful, it’s incredible when you happen to receive recognition, but for me, as I said, this has never been the goal.



    In the feature films Mia misses her revenge (directed by Bogdan Theodor Olteanu) and Miracle (directed by Bogdan George Apetri), Ioana Bugarin plays the leading part, succeeding to impersonate two extremely different characters. Mia is a young actress, who talks about the condition of women in the urban environment and the importance of her autonomy, while Cristina Tofan is attracted, at least apparently, to life in the monastery, where she wants to find herself. The role of Laura in Oto, the Barbarian (directed by Ruxandra Ghițescu), a depressed teenager who eventually commits suicide, was also a challenge. Ioana Bugarin:



    I think I was very lucky and somehow I happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was certainly a bit of luck, but all the roles that I ended up playing, I got after some castings. Then, as I started acting, the directors understood the direction I was interested in as an artist, and I was really asked to play parts that I also think suit me. Somehow it became clearer to me as I grew up that I was interested in certain things. Gender discrimination is one of these things, discrimination that sometimes manifests itself in a rather subtle form. Some feminist authors that I discovered while I was studying in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art also helped me to define myself, so I also acquired a vocabulary for the things that concerned me but that I didn’t know how to express. The way we talk about women and the way we present them is very important, culture has this power to shape us, to change a little the way we see the world. That’s why it has always been important for me to choose stories that represent me in order to be able to fully dedicate myself to them. And I can say with gratitude that so far this has happened.



    The most recent show in which Ioana Bugarin plays is Sara/Mara (a kind of comedy with vloggers), an Apollo 111 and Ideo Ideis production, directed by Bogdan Theodor Olteanu. The cast of the show also includes Mădălina Stoica, Alexandru Ion, Ramona Niculae and Carol Ionescu. (MI)


  • Romanian well-established writers’ recent accomplishments

    Romanian well-established writers’ recent accomplishments



    Nora Iuga, one of the most critically-acclaimed living writers, is the author of Hippodrome, a novel brought out by the Polirom Publishers in Bucharest. Having got her novel published, Nora Iuga said she was having a rest after that, writing poetry.



    Poet, prose writer and translator Nora Iuga was born on January 4, 1931. She is a member of the PEN Club and a member of Romanian Writers’ Union. Nora Iuga has got more than 20 volumes published so far, poetry and prose. Here are some of the titles of her works: I’m not the one to blame (1968), The Captivity of the Circle (1970), Opinions on Pain (1980), Heart as a Boxer’s Punch (1982, 2000), The Sky Square (1986), The Night Typist (1996, 2010), The Dummies’ hospital (1998, 2010), The Hump-backed Bus (2001, 2010), Party in Montrouge (2012), The Wet Dog is a willow tree (2013), Hear the brackets crying (2016), Leopold Bloom’s Soap Bar (1993), The Sexagenarian and the Young Man (2000), Harald and the Blue Moon (2014).



    Nora Iuga’s prose and poetry works have been translated into several languages. In 2007, Nora Iuga was the recipient of the Friedrich-Gundolf Prize, awarded by Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, (The German Academy for Language and Literature). In 2015, at the recommendation of the President of Germany, Joachim Gauck, Nora Iuga was awarded the Cross of Merit Order in the Rank of Knight. In 2017, Romanian president Klaus Iohannis bestowed the National Order of Merit in the Rank of Commander on Nora Iuga.



    We had Nora Iuga as a guest on RRI. We invited the distinguished senior writer to speak about her most recent novel, Hippodrome. It is a book with an obvious autobiographical character, dedicated to the city she was brought up in: Sibiu. It is There that she met the Ursuline nuns, it is There that she saw Jovis, the white horse, in Schuster’s window case. The horse still lingers in her memory. It is also there that she taught German during the communist regime, becoming one of the pupils’ favorite teachers.



    Nora Iuga:



    The project of this book dates a while back. It should be 15 years now, I guess, since I have been thinking I owe this city. But it’s not that I owe it like it’s a liability, like it’s a sum of money I borrowed and I need to return. I insist, all throughout the book, on that particular name, Hermannstadt, as it’s that city I have been most attached to, Hermannstadt, and less to the Sibiu of today. As it was there that for the first time I felt the thrill of love, when I was ten, without realizing what that mix of feelings meant, I just couldn’t explain the feeling I had on a winter night, when I was on the main street running to the Romans’ Emperor, Sibiu’s most important Saxon hotel. It was there that my daddy had his live concerts, he was a violinist and head of the orchestra, and I was hurrying to give him the little pine three cake he had to rosin his bow hair with. This city also occasioned encounters with people whose influence on my destiny was crucial. Unfortunately, quite a few of them have for long not been among us. No more nuns, my nuns of the Ursuline Monastery, to whom I owe half of my being. Whenever, in my books, I bring up Nora A and Nora B, I am not doing that randomly, I am made of two halves that are at loggerheads with one another, but that’s not unusual. I am dead positive that in every human being, there are two antagonistic and almost incompatible characters who quarrel all the time. And if Nora A is the frantically larksome one, Nora B is the wiser one and she is always lecturing Nora A.



    Here is Nora Iuga once again, this time speaking about how she constructed Hippodrome, the novel that captured a life lived under three dictatorships, two of them instated by Carol II and Ion Antonescu, followed by the third dictatorship, the communist one.



    There are two distinct categories of writers, those who construct, while the other ones let themselves lead by that uncontrolled inner flow, and I certainly belong to the second category. That uncontrolled inner flow can be quite like memories, since we cannot control the memories coming upon us. And so vivid are some of those memories that they almost frighten us, it is thanks to our memories that we can relive certain events as they really happened, well, almost. It seems to me memories can be compared with the dreams that can take the shape of the things that happened long before, yet in a slightly changed manner. Notwithstanding, we can identify those events that happened a long time ago, we know that a long, long time ago, we might have lived that. When old age comes, when you find yourself all alone, the greatest joy is to be able to go deeper into your inner self, but that does not mean you must relate to your biographical past.


    Just as it can be also seen in the book, I lived under three dictatorships and I can say I am still very fond of the time of monarchy during which I lived when I was a child and for which I have vivid memories that still linger in my mind, I cannot imagine a time more beautiful than that. I have always lived under the sign of contradictions, but as a child I did not realize it was unjust to walk barefoot just as I saw hucksters walking. Funny thing is, when I look back at that, right now, I seem to watch a movie which is full of poetry. What I’m trying to say is that I just cannot be too hard on everybody, I believe each and every one of us has very deep roots in childhood, and those roots cannot be torn up by anyone. Things that today can be rectifiable, for me they were a source of joy.


    (EN)




  • US translator Sean Cotter

    US translator Sean Cotter

    The English version of the early 20th century Romanian novel Rakes of the Old Court was brought out in 2021 in the USA. The translator of the novel is Sean Cotter. The translator teaches Comparative literature and Translation studies with the University of Dallas in Texas. Sean Cotter specializes in Modernism, and in the Theory and History of translation. Sean Cotter also specializes in the literature of South-East Europe. Mateiu Caragiales novel, Rakes of the Old Court, was brought out in 1929. It is arguably one of Romanian literatures most relevant novels: lots of aficionados revolved around the book. According to a classification compiled by the Cultural Observer magazine in the early 2000, Rakes of the Old Court was rated as the best novel in Romanian literature. We sat down and spoke to Sean Cotter about the translation process proper, which was completed in eleven years. We also spoke about Sean Cotters most recent translations and about how he approached Romanian literature:


    In the USA, Romanian literature is practically unknown. Northwestern University Press has a series dedicated toi world literature and publishers were interested in bringing out this book, which is a great novelty for the American readers. I told them it was a very important book, a book of unparalleled beauty and that it would have been a pity for the American readers not to become familiar with it. My specialty, as a university professor of Comparative literature, is European modernism, I wrote about Lucian Blaga, T.S.Eliot as well as about other writers of that particular timeframe. What Im trying to say is that reaching out to Mateiu Caragiales book came as something natural and I must admit that for me, the translation of that text posed a true challenge, it was a set target for me, the translation of that text which is being known as partially untranslatable. As far as I am concerned, I take each and every word very seriously, I just cannot leave anything out. So I can quite aptly say mine was a very close connection with the text of Mateiu Caragiale, who in no way was an ordinary person. The documentation I made proved extremely helpful, I read just about all that was written on Mateiu Caragiale, ranging from G. Călinescu and Șerban Cioculescu to Nicolae Manolescu and Cosmin Ciotloș. Șerban Cioculescu even compiled a dictionary of words used by Mateiu Caragiale, which helped me a lot. So, the key to penetrating that writers fictional world was for me to imagine him like a character, to understand how he thought and how he wrote that book, I did need that image, so that I could create a bridge between myself and the original text. That is why Im saying that documentation in the case of the translation of the book Rakes of the Old Court was essential. Reading everything that was written about his work and also the biography of Mateiu Caragiale helped me a lot. I would characterize Mateiu Caragiale, first, as a dandy. In the English language literature, there is this type of character/author, and Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe are two such examples. This type of literature, the decadent English language literature, helped me a lot to understand and translate Matei Caragiale.



    Sean Cotter first arrived in Bucharest in 1994, because of a wrongly placed stamp. He was 23 years old and was working as a volunteer for a governmental organization. Here he is with details:

    That’s how it happened: I was supposed to go to Kazakhstan, I was a volunteer in a governmental organization, the Peace Corps. And I was very happy that I arrived in Romania, although I didn’t know anything about this country, I say it in all honesty. All I knew was that da meant yes and that nu was no, but I sometimes confused these words as well. I attended a Romanian language course, which was organized in the building of a general school in Piata Amzei- Amzei Square. There I learned Romanian intensively, four hours a day. I remember that at that course the teacher challenged us to try a translation of the Poem by Nichita Stănescu, of that short poem which read like this: ‘Tell me, if one day I grabbed you and kissed the sole of your foot, wouldn’t you limp a little, afterwards, for fear of crushing my kiss? As I teach the science of translation at the University, from time to time I also propose to my students to translate this poem. So, in just one year, it must have been translated by over 400 students, so we can say that it is the most translated poem from the Romanian language. Romanian literature is very close to my soul. My passion for Romanian literature is actually my life.



    Sean Cotter has translated into English many Romanian writers: Mircea Cărtărescu (Blinding – The Left Wing), (Wheel with a single Spoke), T.O.Bobe (Curl), Nichita Danilov (Second-hand Souls), Liliana Ursu (Lightwall), Magda Cârneci (FEM). This year will see the publication in the US, also translated by Sean Cotter, of the novel Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu who received important international awards. Sean Cotter is also the author of the book Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania (Rochester University Press, 2014), which won the Biennial Society for Romanian Studies – SRS Book Prize. (EN, LS)

  • ”Miracle”, a new film directed by Bogdan George Apetri

    ”Miracle”, a new film directed by Bogdan George Apetri

    Miracle, the latest film by Bogdan George Apetri is being screened in more than 40 cinemas in over 20 cities and towns in Romania. The film, a psychological thriller, features Ioana Bugarin and Emanuel Parvu in the lead role. After Unidentified, which last year won the trophy of the Anonimul Film festival, Miracle is the second part of a trilogy whose action is placed in Piatra Neamt, the native town of director Bogdan George Apetri. The director has been living in the US for 20 years and is a professor at the Columbia University in New York. Divided into two chapters, Miracle starts with a young nun, Cristina Tofan, impersonated by Ioana Bugarin, who leaves the monastery to go to a hospital in the neighbouring town. The second part of the film focuses on Marius Preda, played by Emanuel Pârvu, the police inspector who reconstitutes her journey step by step. His investigation leads to clues and confessions that reveal not only the truth behind Cristina’s actions, but also a possible miracle. Bogdan George Apetri told us more about the connection between the films that make up this trilogy and about how his latest film, which had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2021, was received. It was the first participation in 12 years of a Romanian feature film in the Orizzonti competition section.



    Bogdan George Apetri: “It’s a trilogy, but it’s not necessarily a typical trilogy, in which films are connected to each other so that those who haven’t seen Unidentified can see Miracle and understand the story. The stories are not that connected to each other, they are rather separate. But it’s about the same universe. Some lead characters in one movie become supporting characters in the other, so I built the trilogy as three separate films in terms of narrative but I included all of them in the same universe. I came up with this idea while reading Balzac’s The Human Comedy, which, as you know, is made up of a number of books with separate stories but with characters that we find in almost each of these volumes. That’s how I came up with the idea, which I thought was very good. It’s not a TV series, but it is not a completely independent movie either. For me it is a very interesting experiment, the same city appearing in three movies and becoming itself a character. Basically, a movie is a continuous rewriting. You have an idea, you develop it, then you write the script, have a second, third version, sometimes a 10th version. And when you are on set, you write it again, because only then you are truly face to face with the actors, with the truth of the story. The editing is followed by another rewrite, plus the sound mix, which is also very important for the story, at least in my opinion. Choosing the soundtrack is in fact another rewrite of the film, because you are giving it a new emotion. So this is what a movie is, a continuous rewriting, a lot like the process of writing a book. Who knows, maybe I’ll write a book in the future. Obviously, there are differences in terms of writing process, but there are also many similarities between making a movie and writing a book. Very important for a director is to pick an idea, a story that he can live with for a few years, something he thinks about all this time. The idea for Miracle came to me in 2018 and in the summer of 2019 I was already filming it in Piatra Neamț. I was lucky enough to film before the pandemic, but I had the bad luck to release it during the pandemic. I made the post-production of both films in the Czech Republic, at Barrandov Studios, where I worked with a sensational team.



    Miracle had good reviews in the foreign press, after last year’s premiere in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival, dedicated to films that represent the latest and most expressive trends in international cinema. Variety concluded that Miracle was one of the best films of the Venice Film Festival. The director told us more about the premiere in Venice: “I was happy because most of the team was present in Venice. The lead actors were there, alongside producer Oana Iancu and casting director Cătălin Dordea. I was very happy that all these people that worked so hard on the film were in Venice. It was a great achievement and the team enjoyed the success of the film. And now, at its release, I am glad to be in the country because this way I can participate in many screenings.



    Alongside Ioana Bugarin and Emanuel Pârvu, the cast of “Miracle also includes Cezar Antal, Ovidiu Crișan, Valeriu Andriuță, Ana Ularu, Valentin Popescu, Marian Râlea, Nora Covali, Natalia Călin, Cătălina Moga, Olimpia Mălai, Vasile Muraru and Mircea Postelnicu. The director of photography is Oleg Mutu, the set design is signed by Mihaela Poenaru, the costumes are signed by Liene Dobrāja, and the makeup by Bianca Boeroiu. The film is produced by Oana Iancu and Bogdan George Apetri through their new production house The East Company Productions. The project participated in the Works in Progress section of Les Films de Cannes à Bucharest in 2020.