Radio România Internațional

Category: World of Culture

The representation of women in Romanian art

The Cotroceni National Museum in Bucharest venues an exhibition dedicated to women. Collector, art historian and curator Cosmin Nasui tells us more about it:

The exhibition dubbed The Representation of Women in Romanian Art brings together works from the collections of the members of the Society of Romanian Art Collectors and of the Cotroceni National Museum. Consequently, the works of art are from both private collections and from the institutional heritage of Cotroceni National Museum. The selected exhibits are less known ones, which have rarely been exhibited before. Some of them were made especially for this occasion. The items of the Society Collectors cover the entire 20th century and the 21st century with recent acquisitions. As regards the collection dedicated to representations of women in Romanian art, there are 29 such private collections from which exhibits have been picked. We obviously focused on works that can be displayed in a museum such as the Cotroceni National Museum. Most of the exhibits are paintings, graphic works and sculptures, representative of the late 19th century, starting with historical works signed by artists such as Misu Pop and others. There are also works by Trenk and Volkers, who came to Romania to accompany King Ferdinand on his documentary trips and during the military preparations around the Independence War. There is also the period defined by some art critics as the period of academics, and by other critics as the period of the primitives of Romanian art, represented by Misu Popp and his generation or artists. There are also works by well known painters such as Theodor Aman, Nicolae Grigorescu, Nicolae Tonitza, Petrașcu, up to more recent artists such as Horia Bernea or sculptors such as Oscar Han, Milița Petrașcu, or Medrea, big names with less exhibited or less known works.

Cosmin Năsui tells us ore about the exhibition The Representation of Women in Romanian Art, venued by the Cotroceni National Museum in Bucharest:

The works are displayed in a chronological order, as they have been part of various collections throughout time. We either refer to items that are part of historical collections, such as Tzigara-Saurcas, or to works that re-entered the private circuit after being given back to private owners by the National Art Museum. Important works which, for instance, are signed by Nicolae Grigorescu, were part of all important retrospectives of this artist, whether we refer to the ones in the 1950s or 1980s, which are today displayed for visitors at the Cotroceni National Museum. The topic of female representations in Romanian art is, of course, a complex one. So, given the exhibition halls at the Cotroceni National Museum and the availability of works from private collections, we have chosen a number of secondary themes. The exhibition opens with a gallery of portraits that cover, to say so, the entire range of types of female portraits. There is a section dedicated to female personalities, where we have paintings of Elena Cuza, Queen Elisabeth and Queen Mary. These portraits, besides revealing the skills of their authors, are also an occasion to discover the beauties that drew the attention of artists. There is another section of the exhibition dedicated to nudes, a privileged motif in collections from all historical periods. In spite of being less appealing to contemporary artists, this motif can be rediscovered. I believe the exhibition can also be very interesting for private art collectors, because they can find here famous works sold for record prices on the art market.

2 April 2022
Fine artists take a stand against the war in Ukraine

Can art be a weapon used against the war? What happens when fine artists get together to protest against todays events? “Bombs and Humans. Artists united against the war” is the theme of an exhibition held in Bucharest over March 12 and April 3rd. The exhibition brings together works by artists from Romania and Ukraine, who thus conveyed their protest message to everybody. Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu is the curator of the exhibition. Here she is, speaking about how the exhibition came into being and about the dozens of exhibiting artists.

“There are 74 artists, of whom 18 are from Ukraine. The crisis and emergency situations call for reactions, nay, they do not call for, they trigger emergency reactions. So impressed weve all been with what happens in Ukraine that we chose to express how we feel about it the way we, the artists, know how to do it: scratching the surface a little bit, taking a closer look at the citadel, at the citadels drawbacks, at the worlds drawbacks, and we reacted to that. It all happened so fast, in the second day of the war we said, Its about time! Were gonna get this exhibition going! Humanitarian aid was collected at the Art Cell and Carol 53, which is the venue of the exhibition and Daniel Loagar, the one whos the coordinator here, said, Raluca, why dont we put this exhibition together, Bombs and Humans. Easier said than done. And we launched a call to artists, whose unanimous answer was Were all here. Some of them had works on the war theme. Weve got an artist whom I hold most dear, he hails from Bessarabia, he had an exceptional work about the previous conflicts in Ukraine. I invited him with that work, Valeriu Schiau is his name. Otherwise, almost all artists have created dedicated works for this exhibition. Beaver, who also made the poster and the Facebook and the Instagram covers, the emblem of the exhibition. Alexandru Ranga, who created a special object, a sculpture, which is very interesting. Denis Nanciu, Mircea Diaconu, who created special works, in metal, they are sculptors. Ștefan Radu Crețu, who make a graphic work, I have known Ștefan Radu Crețu for a long time now, and his drawings about this conflict, about this war, have been posted on Instagram. We have a war reporter, Alfred Schupler, with some bewildering images. We have snapshots of the protests Romanians staged in Paris, those are photographs, so that is also a photo coverage, Maria Scarlat Malița. Three Ukrainian artists worked with Daniel Loagăr, the one with “The Art cell” and the NeoNlithic project”, where he included artists from the entire Balkan area as well as its adjoining territories. One of those women artists invited artists, people she knew, friends of hers, activists, and all of them answered her call. Of course, we could not have the real-size works, we cannot receive anything from Ukraine, only humanitarian aid is allowed. And they sent texts, images, drawings, everything is tremendously disturbing. And thats how weve reached out to 18 artists form Ukraine.”

Fine artist Daniel Loagăr is the co-organizer of the exhibition. Here he is, also speaking about the endeavor by means of which the project kicked off, and about the complexity of the works that are on display in the exhibition.

“This is an exhibition by means of which we sought to express our solidarity, our support and our sympathy for neighbors and friends. In effect, through the studio I am working in, I have been carrying “Wood Be Nice”, an international project I initiated two years ago with Ukrainian and Romanian artists. It was themed “NeoNlithic 2″. We have stayed friends ever since, me and a couple of artists in Cernauti, and now that the war has knocked at their doors, we rushed in to help them out. Starting from the second or the third day of war, we collected humanitarian aid every day, donations, and once in two days, or thereabouts, we sent a van loaded with food, with medicine, with warm clothes in Cernauti and even farther, I understand the last shipment has reached Kyiv. This exhibition, the Bombs and Humans project, weve jointly staged it with curator Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu. One night, while we were speaking about the actual existing threats, about the nuclear threat, to be more specific, I sent Raluca this idea, made of a couple of projects, themed Sweets and Humans, Flowers and Humans, and she was quick to respond, she contacted artists from Romania who joined in for the projects, part of them I brought myself, as for those from Ukraine, I also brought them, with my colleague at the Wood Be Nice artists studio. There was no limit as regards the techniques. We have sculptures, we have linocut works, we have graphic art, we have installations, we have painting, we have video installations, we have movies. There were no limitations for us. The message we conveyed to the artists was something like: create about what you feel this very moment, about what you think right now. And, of course, all of us are against the war and all of us have been trying to support our neighbours in Ukraine. It is a message of hope, in its initial stage, a message of solidarity, of friendship and I also think theres another message that needs to be conveyed, we cannot go on like that, weve had enough of it. All the works have been put up for sale, 20% of the purchase price goes to Ukraine, all artists have agreed on that.”

Here is Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu once again, this time touching upon the moments weve been experiencing, upon the charity dimension of our project, also touching upon a prospective path, for the future.

“A state of emergency. A local and planetary crisis. The war against Ukraine is the topic that brought these artists together, they all managed to get their work done at such a short notice. It is a protest-exhibition, “Bombs and Humans. Artists united against the war, it is also a charity exhibition. It is venued by an underground area, it is not mounted in an institutional area, weve staged it with the clear purpose of emphasizing the emergency. You dont go to a comfortable place, with white walls, a clean space, when what you have to say is urgent, theres no room for you to do that either. All the seats have been taken. All these people have gathered, they worked especially on this theme, the overwhelming majority worked on that theme of the war waged by Putin. It is a war waged by men, aggressive and strong, against women, against children, against civilians, against a people who did them no harm in any way, save for their wish to get closer to Europe. On the opening day we had some sort of admission ticket, meaning that visitors had to bring aid, like canned food, unperishable foodstuff or hygiene objects, for the victims of the war and for the refugees from Ukraine. We sold various objects created by the artists. We keep on selling them. A little bit of funding has also been raised. With the money we got we shall buy objects the refugees and the victims of this war need. The message is that the war must end, right now. It is a message of peace; it is a protest against the war. Some more artists have turned up even after weve had the opening event. We can continue, it depends on the available premises were going to find. By all means, artists are going to work focusing on this theme. Besides, we should not forget were vulnerable any time. “

(EN)

26 March 2022
Classix Festival

The city of Iasi, in north-eastern Romania, hosted this February Classix Festival, an event devoted to music lovers, young people in particular, in an attempt to facilitate the return to both classical and contemporary music. An event that brought together concerts, launches and exhibitions, in a hybrid format, adapted to the times we are living in, so participants could attend both offline and online. Anca Spiridon the festivals PR officer, told us more about Classix Festival and what it welcomed its guests with:

“Classix Festival is a classical music festival that we describe as a contemporary classic affair, and adventure that started in Iasi in 2020, and whose main goal is to attract a new audience, through the program selected, the unconventional venues and the related events. The third Classix Festival was held this year between the 13th and the 19th of February, both physically and online. The program included 8 classical music concerts, held in Iasi at the Culture Palace, the Vasile Alexandri National Theatre, the Mihai Eminescu University Library, Bals House and the Literature Museum, and was accompanied by other events, such as 10 courses in craftsmanship, an illustration exhibition, debates, seven film screenings. The program brought together more than 16 artists from 13 countries. The third editions goal was to discover beauty in a feminine and mystic form, full of strength. For instance, many of the pieces included in the program , both classical and contemporary, were composed by women. We maintained the hybrid format of the event, and so the concerts were held both in the concert halls proper, with an allowed capacity of 30%, but all the 8 concerts were broadcast online on the festivals Facebook page and on our partners pages, and they will be available for another month.”

Anca Spiridon also told us about the challenges of this years edition of the festival and its main theme.

“The main challenge was turning Classix into a bigger event, that is extending it from five days to seven and also to properly deal with the complexity of the event. There were 60 artists who came for an event where only 30% of the audience could directly enjoy the concerts in the hall, and that in itself was a big challenge. However, we are aware of the impact in the virtual world, with dozens of thousands of watchers online who had the opportunity to watch this years program, so if we draw the line, it was worth it. We had many foreign guests at the festival, including the Auner Quartet of Austria, the German cellist Gustav Rivinius, the Norwegian pianist Havard Gimse, and the Norwegian violinist Bjarne Magnus Jensen. The themes approached at the third Classix Festival were about feminism in classical music, about authenticity and about genuine emotions. We tried to present beauty in a mystic shape, both sensitive and strong and ready to impress through details.”

In the end of our talk, Anca Spiridon told us about the idea of bringing the young audience closer to classical music through such a festival.

“Something that we learnt at the 2021 edition, during a book launch is that for many of us classical music is like a train that we didnt catch on time. We rarely have the education and the openness to go deeper into it. And for us is a great joy to see that every year young people come for the pleasure of the experience as such, to listen to music and feel it without having any particular musical background or knowledge about a certain genre, composer or performer. And when we see that we manage to come so close to an audience of all ages, and mainly that most of them are young, its a great joy for us and a sign that what we do is the right thing to do. In a world that is getting more digital by the day, feelings, emotions are still important and music plays a big role in that, so we must keep on doing things like these.” (MI)

5 March 2022
Romania at the Venice Art Biennale

You Are Another Me – A Cathedral of the Body is the title of the
project that will represent Romania at the 59th edition of the Venice
Art Biennale. The work of the director and script writer Adina Pintilie, who
won the Golden Bear Trophy at the Berlin Film Festival in 2018 with her debut film
Touch Me Not, the project was selected following a national competition organised
by the ministry of culture, the foreign ministry and the Romanian Cultural
Institute. Attila Kim, Romania’s Commissioner for the Venice Art Biennale,
tells us more:

The winner
was chosen after a competition that began last year and ended this year. The winner
was Adina Pintilie’s project because it is a project that distances itself from
the medium we associated Adina Pintilie with, namely film, and that makes a
step closer to viewers, bringing the film much closer, deconstructing it and
inviting viewers to engage in a dialogue about intimacy and the relationship with
the body. This experience is accompanied by a VR installation inviting viewers
to in effect get into the skin of the people in the documentary, both in the
new gallery of the Romanian Culture Institute in Venice and online.

Attila Kim,
Romania’s Commissioner for the Venice Art Biennale tells us more about where
visitors can see the artistic events stage by Romania at the Biennale:

Romania has
its own pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which has been located at the heart of
the Biennale in the Giardini della Biennale, since 1938. A few other countries
also have pavilions in Venice, but Romania is the only one to also host events,
apart from its pavilion in the Giardini, at its New Gallery of the Romanian
Cultural Institute. Like with every edition, the main exhibition, apart from
the contribution of each country, consists of an international art exhibition,
which this year is curated by Cecilia Alemani and brings together 213 artists, including two from Romania:
Alexandra Pirici, who created the project that represented Romania at the
Venice Biennale in 2013, who has a performance this year, and Andra Ursuță, who
lives now in New York. Romania is also taking part in a very important project,
the ERIAC Pavilion, which is seeking to promote Roma arts and culture from
around Europe, and which contains an exhibition from the Romanian artist Eugen
Raportoru.

We talked to Adina Pintilie about her team’s project, its concept and artistic
research, the work behind the project and its visual and emotional impact:

We are happy to be able to put this project together and it will be a
difficult, but interesting period. The artistic research on which the project
is based began many years ago out of a sort of curiosity and need to re-educate
ourselves about intimacy and the body. We grow up, in family and society, with
certain ideas about the body, beauty, love and relations and these ideas are
often in contradiction to the real experience of our life so, together with a
group of performers and crew I started this laboratory, this emotional nursery,
in which we tried to forget everything we know and look with fresh eyes at how
people experience in fact intimacy, regardless of the ideas and myths we all
grow up with. We want to bring this project of introspection and experimentation
of the relationship with the other closer to the public. An important aspect is
the audio-visual language, the way in which this type of artistic research can
be transmitted to the public and the way in which the public can become part of
this research project. I first explored these ideas in cinema, in the film
Touch Me Not, which came out in 2018 and now it will be interesting for us to
work with video installation. We’re working with several formats at the same
time: installation, video, film, interactive performance, books and online. We’re
now focusing on the multimedia video installation at the Romanian Pavilion and
the VR extension at the venue of the Romanian Cultural Institute because it is a
language totally different from film and which provides you with a different type
of relationship between the body of the visitor and the body of the performers.
So, unlike in cinema, where viewers are at a distance from what goes on the
screen, the exhibition is an immersive experience, physically, emotionally and introspectively.

Where did it all start? What is the psychological and creative mechanism
that generates such a project? Adina Pintilie again:

It wasn’t something I thought about in terms of society, the external
world. My interest in the body and intimacy was something that came from inside.
Each of us taking part in the project has our own way of relating to our bodies,
the experience of identity and together we’re exploring an area which hopefully
will engender a similar type of introspection on the part of the viewer. I’m convinced
it will start a conversation about the body, intimacy, identity, things that
are important to us but which are sensitive areas about which we find it
difficult to communicate.

26 February 2022
The Bucharest Bookshops Center and its recent projects

Super stories from Bucharest is the title of an anthology that has been launched recently. It is the first book written by children and adolescents of Bucharest. It brings together stories that re-enliven the legends and the tales from the history of the city. The collection includes stories authored by the winners of the contest also dubbed Super stories from Bucharest. The contest was launched in early 2021.

With the support of Bucharest Municipality and ARCUB, Romania’s longest-lasting chain of bookshops, the Bucharest Bookshops Company, printed a few thousand copies of the anthology titled Super stories from Bucharest. The book is given out for free in all 40 bookshops as part of the Bucharest Bookshops Company. The initiators of Super stories from Bucharest are the Bucharest Bookshops Company jointly with Headsome Communication. The initiator and the coordinator of the project, Oana Boca Stănescu, is the president of Headsome Communication.

Oana Boca Stanescu:

This book was born as part of an event staged by the Bucharest Bookshops Company. As far as I’m concerned, I have been and still am inspired by the activities staged by the Bucharest Bookshops Company, an outlet that has been on the book market for more than 71 years now, I am impressed by their success, the Bucharest Bookshops Company has succeeded to stay close to all book lovers from around the capital city. In 2020, the Bucharest Bookshops Company was getting ready to celebrate 70 years since their foundation and, since we have been jointly carrying cultural projects for quite some time now, we were planning a rather ambitious schedule. However, the pandemic broke out and all the planned events were no longer possible, but still, we succeeded to carry some of the events through. One such event was an initiative to plant trees in Bucharest, as a sign of the fact that the Bucharest Bookshops Company has been close to the readers in the capital city for almost three generations and the company holds dear the future generation as well. The event I’m speaking about was staged in the Youth Park, there we organized that action of planting trees. And that’s how I got to hear stories about the Vale of Tears, about a submerged church, about the Cocioc Lake in the Youth Park, while me and other people younger than myself realized we didn’t know much about those places. And we realized that, perhaps, the younger generations are not very familiar with the stories and legends of Bucharest either. And that’s how we thought to initiate this project, by means of which we sought to re-enliven the legends and the stories of Bucharest. And, without the support and the enthusiasm of the Bucharest Bookshops Company, as the project running as Super stories from Bucharest is Bucharest Bookshops Brand, we would not have been able to carry it through, to materialize it. Fortunately, for quite a few years now we have been witnessing a revival of the literature for children, we’ve got quite a few living authors who write literature for children. I think it is the most marvelous thing that can happen on a book market, which is rather poor, as if you want to train new generations of readers, you need to draw them to reading in due time

Marieta Seba, the general manager of the Bucharest Bookshops Company, tells us how the project came into being.

This project, just as Oana Boca Stănescu said, was born as part of the tree-planting event we organized, jointly with the Bucharest Bookshops Company. In 2020 we had set for ourselves the task of celebrating the Bucharest Bookshops Company’s 70 anniversary in a rather festive way, staging a couple of events and being more public and communication-centered. Because of the pandemic, it was no longer possible for us to implement our ideas, so our collaborators came up with this idea, that of planting trees in the Youth Park. It was an event that also drew children, who turned up in large numbers. We saw children were brimming with joy as they were taking part in the event, so we thought of marking the Bucharest Bookshops Company’s 70th anniversary staging more than one event for that. So, we also thought of getting a booklet brought out. And we do hope for all that to be just the beginning of a project, to be run along many years from now and to develop into a wider-scope project, capable of getting as many schoolchildren as possible involved. In everything we have achieved so far it was about a lot of passion, a lot of heart we put into it, as that is also our slogan. Out of love for the book. For us, those with the Bucharest Bookshops Company, the financial aspect has never been a priority, every time we tried to do interesting and creative things, capable of representing us, even though there wasn’t enough funding for that.

Ioana-Alexandra Anastasiu, a pupil of Middle School number 280 in Bucharest, is one of the winners of the contest launched as Super Stories from Bucharest. Her story about the Capsa House has been included in the anthology that has recently been launched by the the Bucharest Bookshops Company with a similar title, Super Stories from Bucharest.

Ioana-Alexandra Anastasiu:

I registered, jointly with my Religion teacher, for an optional course themed Travelers through Bucharest. And during each class we were discussing the legends and the history of the buildings of Bucharest, so much so that, as soon as I’ve learned about this contest, Super Stories from Bucharest, I made my mind up to participate straight away, as I am passionate about the Romanian Language and History and I saw that as a fine opportunity for me to express my passions. I opted for writing about the Capsa House as it is one of Bucharest’s most elegant and most sumptuous buildings, it is a building that, in time, was visited by many personalities, especially at the time of La Belle Epoque. I have always admired this building and I really got my kicks out of being given the opportunity to write about it.

The project was successful and managed to arouse the interest of children and adolescents, so the organizers sought to strengthen the initiative and, in early 2022, they initiated the second edition of the story-writing contest.

(EN)

10 February 2022
The National Bank Museum reopens

The Museum of the National Bank of Romania has reopened starting the end of last year. Guests can discover the new galleries of the museum, whereas temporary exhibitions observe modern presentation concepts, according to European standards. Apart from the exhibits themselves, guests will also have the opportunity of admiring the beautiful neoclassical building in the old part of Bucharest.

Speaking about the building and the National Bank of Romania is Ruxandra Onofrei, an expert with the National Bank Museum: “The National Bank was founded in 1880. It was an element of modernity for the Romanian state at the time, as it was the 16th central bank established at global level. During its first years, the National Bank operated in a different building. In 1882, it purchased the building of the former Șerban Vodă inn from the Romanian state, on the ruins of which it started raising the current building. In 1884, the National Bank invited two well-established French architects, Cassien Berard and Albert Galleron, who suggested a mix of the neoclassical style with French-inspired eclectic elements of 19th–century and early 20th-century architecture. Our museum was set up in one of the most important halls in the building, which we call “the Marble Hall. It is currently hosting the temporary exhibition devoted to King Michael I. It used to be called “the Counter Hall in 1890, since in its early days, the National Bank also had public relations operations. Under every arch of this hall there used to be a desk, behind which a bank clerk would work. A long table was laid out in the middle of the hall, where clients could find the standard forms. The acoustics of the hall is special, allowing for the absorption of echo and thus preventing people from hearing what others are talking about close-by. Every clerk had his own safe box where he stored cash and valuables at the end of the day. Our temporary exhibition contains twelve such safe boxes. Guests can also admire various items such as coins, bills or other objects of special value and interest in our museum collection.

Ruxandra Onofrei also talked about the permanent exhibition of the museum: “The permanent exhibition also includes, alongside the spectacular halls in the Old Palace of the National Bank which venues our museum, the history of currency circulation in Romania. The collection is made up of coins displayed chronologically, starting with some from the 5th century BC, minted at Histria Fortress, and going through all other historical periods until 186, when the Romanian monetary system was introduced. Another section of the museums permanent numismatic exhibition is the history of the Romanian Leu, the domestic currency, from 1867 until today. Also on display is a selection of the most relevant coins that have circulated on Romania’s territory.

One of the temporary exhibitions of the National Bank Museum, entitled “100 years since the birth of King Michael (1921-2017) is displayed at the center of the Marble Hall. Ruxandra Onofrei tells us more about it: “This exhibition was put together in collaboration with the Royal House of Romania, the National Archives, the Dimitrie Gusti Village Museum and the Ferdinand I Military Museum. The exhibition dedicated to King Michael I, marking 100 years since his birth, was opened on October 25, 2021 and can be visited until May 31, 2022. Its purpose is to take visitors through the life of Romanias last monarch. His life overlaps, in fact, with many important moments in our national history, which we have included in this exhibition. There are also less conventional objects on display, such as King Michael’s birthday certificate, which has been exhibited for the first time, a number of photos of the monarch and some of his school tests. The last section of the exhibition is represented by the 500 lei gold coin, occasioned by the anniversary of 100 years since the birth of King Michael I and a proof replica of the commemorative medal “Ardealul Nostru, that has been issued in the early 1945 and is better known to the public as “Cocoșel. By putting this coin into circulation in 1945, the government was trying to protect peoples’ savings and play down the effects of inflation which everyone was anticipating once the war was over. (VP & EE)

5 February 2022
Snowing Darkness

Gabriel Achim’s film ‘Snowing Darkness had its world premiere in the ‘Rebels With A Cause competition selection at the 25th edition of PÖFF – Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, which took place at the end of November 2021. The festival, whose first edition was held in 1997 in the Estonian capital, is one of the most important cinematographic events in Europe, with one of the most visible competition sections in the region. ‘Snowing Darkness is produced by Mandragora, and its release in cinema halls in Romania is scheduled for the first part of the year.

We talked to Gabriel Achim about the complicated birth process of his third feature film ‘Snowing Darkness: “Unfortunately, we are living in challenging times that should make us turn to the essentials, help us value time more, and seek quality more. But this has not happened, on the contrary, there has been a dilution of values, and the arts seem to become more and more useless, because people are slowly taking a distance from them. I could say that ‘Snowing Darkness is a film made almost independently, the very small funding did not allow us to have a large team or very many actors. But I’m used to it, and eventually it all came together, and I managed to make a movie that I do like a lot. Before I started working on this film, I had a project that had received funding through the EU Media program, it had a French co-producer, and it had won several international development awards through the festival circuit. It was a project that seemed to be my third feature film. Unfortunately, I did not manage to get funding from Romania, and I realized that it no longer made sense to apply to the National Center of Cinematography. I then had a discussion with film director Cristi Puiu, who, seeing me quite desperate because I could not carry on with that respective project, advised me to write a screenplay based on the situation I was in at that moment. I had two more weeks until the moment I was supposed to apply for funding, but I got mobilized and wrote the film script together with Cosmin Manolache, with whom I usually collaborate. When I edited the film, I had to give up certain things that I had in the initial script, because it would have been too complex, too focused on this idea of provoking the film viewers, of making them get out of their comfort zone. I guess that had I left it in that initial form, I would have pushed too many spectators away. So, I reconsidered my script. I made a film with a complex structure, but a friendlier one and closer to my intentions, a film which, even if it challenges the spectators, will convey what I intended to get across. I can say that I made up for the lack of money through the enthusiasm of the team. I also had an exceptional set designer, Ana Gabriela Lemnaru, also a very professional team whom I also work with on the series Las Fierbinți.

‘Snowing Darkness tells the story of Teo, a director who rehearses with actors for a new project. The subject, autobiographical, is confusing from the beginning: the turmoil of a director who stages a play about the drama he experiences after the death of his little daughter, following an incurable disease. As the story progresses, story that has 5 working versions, uncertain episodes come to light, bordering on life and fiction and accentuating dilemmas.

Here is Gabriel Achim with details: “It’s a very complex story. In fact, it is a film made up of 5 stories, there are 5 actors who play different roles, and the only ones who accompany us permanently throughout the story are the main character and his little girl. The other actors play several roles, since its a complex story, which is difficult to summarize in a few words. Its always dark inside us, and in the dark, you always have surprises. And so is this movie, with many surprises, sometimes it can scare you, other times it can make you laugh.

Along with Bogdan Dumitrache, who has the main role, the cast of the film also includes the actors Anca Androne, Luiza Gherghinescu, Gheorghe Ifrim, Rolando Matsangos and Silvana Mihai. The screenplay is signed by Gabriel Achim and Cosmin Manolache, the image by Adrian Iurchevici and the film’s producers are Anca Puiu and Smaranda Zărnoianu.

Made with the support of the National Center of Cinematography, Dacin Sara and of the Romanian Television Corporation, the film is distributed in Romania by Iadasarecasa. Gabriel Achim is known for the feature films Ultima zi – Last Day (Romanian Film Days Award in the Feature Film section, TIFF), Visul lui Adalbert – Adalbert’s Dream (Gopo Award) and for the popular television series Las Fierbinți. (LS)

22 January 2022
Alina Grigore, recipient of the Golden Shell Award at SSIFF

Alina Grigore’s
debut feature, Blue Moon, last year scooped the Golden Shell award for best
film at the International Film Festival in San Sebastian (SSIFF), Spain, one of
the most prestigious events of its kind in Europe. Blue Moon was written and
directed by Alina Grigore and features Ioana Chițu, Mircea Postelnicu, Mircea
Silaghi and Vlad Ivanov in its cast. The script draws on Alina Grigore’s
personal experience, who spent part of her childhood in a village in Neamț
County. Girls my age in particular were given no chance of developing. The physical
and psychological abuses we endured were commonplace in our village, Alina
Grigore recalls.

Blue Moon tells the story of Irina, a young girl who wants
to leave her dysfunctional family and dreams of studying in the capital city,
yet fails, plagued by the violence surrounding her. The main prize in the San
Sebastian competition went to a low-budget film produced by a very passionate group
of filmmakers at the National Center for Cinematography. We spoke to Alina
Grigore about the prize she won, how she managed to turn her own experience
into a film and about her unusual behind-the-scenes work ethic.

I used to
live in the countryside for a while. I was seven when I left Bucharest to live
in a village in Neamț County,
and it was quite the culture shock for me. Moving felt even more shocking since
I was very young and used to living in a different kind of community. So I
started penning a diary of everything that happened, and I continued writing about
it even later, when I revisited my diary. First of all, parents had no interest
in educating their children, because their top concern was surviving. Children
were encouraged to either stay and take care of the household or seek work abroad.
I recall one time when I went home to do my homework, and my best friend was
going home too to work the land. This was back in the first or second grade, in
the 90s. Unfortunately, things haven’t changed much ever since. Children
in the rural area are not encouraged to continue their studies. Inspired by
everything I’d seen, I started writing the book I hope to publish one day. We
produced this film using the InLight acting school method, meaning we come up
with an idea and everyone pitches in to develop it. Once I wrote the script, it
was a sustained effort, which required talking to the actors about their
characters and cut-scenes, with the image director and editor. That’s how we
started to discover what actually drives our characters.

The director of the film Blue Moon told us more
about the use of the InLight acting technique, which also gave the name of an
acting school founded by Alina Grigore together with a team of artists:

The novelty
about InLight is that we focus on collaboration with the actors and other
members of the team. In other words, we encourage everyone in the team to say
how they see things, we talk to the director of photography, to the editor, we
analyse the script and we discuss the characters and situations. In my opinion,
it is quite captivating. We put together character descriptions, we come up
with suggestions, we improvise. As far as the plot goes, we have looked for and
found common memories-and given that the topic is family, it is impossible not
to find things in common. And all this research, all this background work is
very helpful for actors. It is a great help, when you are on the set, to
discover things you have in common with others, to know the motivations of your
partner in that particular scene. This is one aspect. Secondly, I was
interested in what the actors think about the script, how they approach it. For
me, this kind of collaborative work is very important. When a text is
translated, I am even interested in what the translator thinks about the text,
so obviously the suggestions coming from the actors and the rest of the team
are very important for me. I think collaboration is more efficient because,
when you allow the others to explore, they reach a higher level of creativity,
which is useful to you as a director because you can benefit from this
creativity. In contrast, if you are the kind of director who only coordinates,
there is not much communication. So, this is what InLight is all about:
collaboration. And if you trust this kind of approach, it is my belief that you
invite more emotion, especially in character building. And finally, you have a
happier team, where each member knows they can express themselves freely, although
obviously within some limits. There were several scenes where the actors were
absolutely free, and I’m thinking especially about a scene with Mircea
Postelnicu and Ioana Chițu, which everybody said came out like a dance, like a
tango between the director of photography, the director and the actors. And this
is exactly what I want-I want making a film to be like a dance with the others.

Until Blue Moon, director Alina Grigore was mostly
known as an actress. She played in several series and in the feature film Illegitime
directed by Adrian Sitaru, for which she was also the screenwriter. (tr. V. Palcu, A.M. Popescu)

15 January 2022
Award-winning Romanian documentaries in late 2021

You are Ceausescu to Me is a documentary film directed by Sebastian Mihailescu. In late 2021, the production scooped two notable awards, the Best Central and East European Documentary and the Best Photography Award. The latter distinction went to the films director of photography, Barbu Balasoiu. The distinctions were awarded as part of the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. Sebastian Mihailescus documentary also scooped the New Talent Award as part of the DocLisboa festival.

The Best Central and East European Documentary Award went to Sebastian Mihailescus film because, according to the judging panel, the film succeeded to recreate, in a playful manner, Romanian history through the method of reconstruction, at once analysing the characters of the reconstruction in a narrative based on self-reflection. You are Ceausescu to me is an experimental mix of a documentary and a feature film which seeks to find the motivation underlying the actions of young Nicolae Ceausescu, the last Romanian dictator, the head of state for then the Socialist Republic of Romania from 1967 to the collapse of the communist regime on December 22nd, 1989. In Sebastian Mihailescus experimental film, youngsters aged between 15 and 22, coming from various walks of life, take part in auditions for the part of young Nicolae Ceausescu, in the 1930s. Pictures are taken of the teenagers as if they were part of archive photographs, turning into fiction a series of official documentaries and taking mutual action. They relate to Nicolae Ceausescu just as if they related to a fictional character, with no preconceptions, appropriating his personality traits according to their passion, via the clichés of commercial cinematography.

The director of You are Ceausescu to me, Sebastian Mihailescu, speaks about his own experimental documentary film.

“Let me just tell you that the character of my documentary does not have that much to do with the historical character Nicolae Ceausescu. The real Nicolae Ceausescu served as a pretext for me, in that I opted for using a character which is at once a caricature and an iconic character, it is iconic in much the same way as, lets say, Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong was, as a result of Andy Warhols portraits, a character whom today everybody is willing to share their views on, even though those people dont know that much about him or they havent lived during the communist regime. I kind of struck it lucky because, as I was working with a historian, I had access to young Nicolae Ceausescus personal file, a file that was kept by then the Homeland Security, Siguranta Statului, the intelligence service that was operational in Romania under that name until November 13, 1940. When the idea crossed my mind to make the film, I was not familiar with that file. I thought I would make a film about Nicolae Ceausescu, and I would present him as an iconic character, as Ive said before, a character all of us pretend we know but whom we dont know that much, actually. I was wondering who might play his part and I was unable to clearly figure out who that particular actor might be for the role. So the idea crossed my mind, that of a collective portrait, and I picked up that part of Ceausescus life before 1945, that particular timeframe when he was an underground communist fighter and he did time in prison, since that period of time seemed more offering to me. I thought that period of time was more generous for my film, all the more so as there are no archive films where the young Ceausescu could be found, back then he was not as important as he would be later. The challenge was for me to recreate or create a series of shots that did not exist, and launch the question whether, in a film starting off from that idea, an inkling of truth could be found. So I thought that, for the casting sessions I would held so that I could pick those actors with the same age as that of then the young Ceausescu, I might stand a chance to get closer to the truth. And that is how I held my casting, I was looking for youngsters coming from various walks of life, educated, less educated, school dropouts just like Ceausescu himself used to be, a school dropout after the first four primary-school grades, but also people who furthered their education. Through that casting I checked whether my attempt to find the young Ceausescu would be successful, also trying to detect what the seeds might be, of the future dictator, the seeds of evil, that is, to discover how and when a man changes, or what lies behind a man who was so controversial.”

The film cast and crew includes professional as well as amateur actors such as Denis Duma, Dan Hudici, Ionuț Amador Motoi, Mario Sandrino Rădulescu, Mihai Topalov, Cristiana-Alexandra Gheorghe, Cristina Parancea, Alin Ilie Grigore, Zhang Florin-Zhiyuan. Claudiu Mitcu, Ioachim Stroe and Robert Fița are the producers of the film. The documentary is produced by Wearebasca, with the support of the National Center of Cinematography jointly with the Romanian Television Corporation. Born in 1983, Sebastian Mihăilescu earned his BA from the I.L.Caragiale National Drama and Film University in Bucharest, class of 2013. His graduation production is a short-reel film titled Old, Luxurious Flat, located in an Ultra-Central, Desirable Neighborhood. Sebastian Mihailescu & Andrei Epure wrote the screenplay. HiFilm are the producers. The film was premiered as part of the International Locarno Film Festival, in 2016, in the Pardi di Domani Competition section.

(Translation by Eugen Nasta)

8 January 2022
Exhibitions by artist Ștefan Câlția

The end of 2021 saw two simultaneous exhibitions by the Romanian artist Ștefan Câlția: Border Blue, in Bucharest, and Glajarie. Close to craftsmanship in Iasi, north-eastern Romania. Two faces of the same creator in two exhibitions, one of paintings and the other one of glass items, made using an old manual technique, known as glajarie.

A fine arts graduate, formed by the great painter Corneliu Baba, Stefan Caltia has always defined himself as a painter of the sky, and critics have usually described his style as fantastic realism. His main themes are the island, the flight, hieratic characters and Christian symbols.

Curator Vladimir Bulat told us a few things about the painting exhibition titled Border Blue:

This exhibition in Bucharest is small and compact, but very intense from all points of view. For example, in just a few works, the artist covers half a century of creation. Of course, it was not the artist’s intention, it was my curatorial intention to show this consistency and concern of the artist Ștefan Câlția for the habitat, for what housing means, for what a house stands for. He shows us that there is a certain scale of living, there is a certain size of the existential garment, which is the house. People used to build as much as they needed. And Ștefan Câlția wants to preserve this in his painting as well. I could say that this word border that I used as a title for the exhibition, refers to an outline, a limit, beyond which you almost cease to be human. That’s what I meant when I used the word border.Blue, on the other hand, is somehow a generic color of the Transylvanian village, as a means to highlight the Romanian specificity in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the rural area, the peasants had to paint their facades blue to show that they were Romanians. That’s kind of the administrative part of the blue dimension. When Ștefan Câlția re-arranged, together with Livia Câlția, his house in the village of Șona (central Romania), he returned to this ancestral blue because he found it everywhere in the first layers of the old houses. That blue was meant to bring him back to what was right, urging the other villagers to do the same. Or, his own house, is in fact an aesthetic project that he brings back to his own village. He left the village and returned. And he actually went back to where he left off, bringing a whole world back, from the way people built their homes to the way they dressed, ate, behaved, and interacted with each other, actually showing the indestructible harmony between the world and man. It seems that today the natural is the one you have to look for, the one that used to be and almost no longer exists. Above all, Ștefan Câlția is a huge public, an aesthetic and artistic consciousness. He expresses himself as a painter, but he says much more than a painter usually says.

Vladimir Bulat also told us about Ștefan Câlția’s artistic origins, the influences in his paintings and how the artist recreated his native village in his works:

Today, the villages in Oltenia are rather dull. But Ștefan Câlția, look, manages, for example, by cutting the facades, to cut a piece of sky in the shape of a house. The village is not just a bunch of houses where people live somehow impersonally, like in the city, where everyone lives in a cell, in a blocks of flats, and depersonalisation is at the maximum. The village has to function as a single organism. That is why, for example, Ștefan Câlția restored the blacksmith shop in the village. For the houses that are now being restored and then painted blue, at some point some metallic details are used that are made there, at the blacksmith shop that was reborn in the heart of the village. First of all, we have to understand that Ștefan Câlția is a painter, and the painter is not born in a desert. His work must be seen in context and somehow from a historical perspective. Here, in the exhibition, what was chosen is somehow a cut-out of what he worked on in 2021, but also things in which I wanted to show the continuity of certain themes.

Matei Caltia, Stefan Caltia’s son, is an artist himself and the one who curated the exhibition in Iasi. He told us about the concept that gave birth to the exhibition that pays homage to the old craft of glass blowing:

This is a project that we have worked on together this year, a project that we’d had in mind for many years and that we have now ventured into, a project that starts from his still lives and his stories about the craft of glass blowing in the South Transylvanian village where he was born. And so we put together a collection of 20 paintings featuring vases, objects of late medieval glassware, and in addition we tried all this spring-summer that passed, to look for shapes, to understand the craft and to make a first attempt to reconstitute, to rebuild these vessels. The exhibition contains almost 150 such glassware. The craft of glassmaking is mainly found in Transylvania, due to the nobility there and the fact that they were part of the Habsburg Empire. Later, these traditional glass blowing shops were bankrupt by the advent of factories and mechanised processes, which changed the way glass was made in order to produce larger quantities. So, to a large extent the craft was lost.

1 January 2022
The National Museum of Romanian Literature, revamped for the 21st century

The
National Museum of Romanian Literature in 2021 has been the recipient of the
European Prize. As part of the on-line awarding ceremony for the European
Museum Academy Awards, the DASA Award went to two of the most relevant and
significant projects the Museum has carried in the last seven years: the main
exhibition in the Nicolae Cretulescu Street and the Anton Pann Memorial House exhibition.
We recall Anton Pann was a Romanian poet of the early 19th century.
Pann was also a composer of religious music, a folklore collector, a man of letters
and a regular contributor to various publications of his time. Here is the judging
panel’s motivation for the award: The permanent exhibition is impressive thanks
to its low-key yet minutely organized layout, rounding off the historical
building which is home to the exhibition. In its educational programs, the National
Museum of Romanian Literature has been audacious and utterly uncompromising,
acting as a vehicle for today’s social problems. At the core of its activity
lies interactive literature.

Indeed, in the organization of the museum’s main
exhibition, the curators and the museographers have first and foremost pursued
the interaction with the public, according to the literary genres (poetry on
the ground floor, prose, essays, literary history and criticism on the upper
floor, while the loft is home to playwrighting). The
museum has a heritage comprising more than 300,000 manuscripts, patrimony items and
old books which include incunabula that are more than 500 years old. Among such
items, there are manuscripts of works by Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Paul
Valéry, Giovanni Papini, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Mihai Eminescu. The National
Museum of Romanian Literature in recent years has been increasingly present on
the literary scene in Bucharest. Specifically, the museum has staged a wide
range of events, from academic symposia to jazz and poetry marathons. Accordingly,
the Museum’s team has developed public reading sessions, conferences, theme
exhibitions, creative workshops, events attended by a target audience. Also,
the museum has staged internationally-recognized events, such as the Bucharest
International Poetry Festival.

In 2021, the Museum was home to the 11th
edition of the Bucharest International Poetry Festival. As part of the event, public
poetry reading sessions were being offered to the audiences by Romania authors.
Joining them, through podcasts and video recordings were poets from England, Argentina,
Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Peru,
Republic of Moldova, Spain and the United States of America. Editor and writer
Ioan Cristescu has been the Director of the National Museum of Romanian Literature
since 2014. He told us that, among other things, his intention was to turn the
museum into a living space. Ioan Cristescu:

There is one thing literary history has taught us, namely a writer’s
presence in society should be a highly significant one. Writers are prominent members
of a community, yet they are no longer perceived like that by society, unfortunately.
And it is not about writers and the readers’ response to their work, it’s about
artists, broadly speaking, today artists are almost totally unknown even though
their work enjoys European, maybe world recognition. Unfortunately, we are no longer interested in getting acquainted
with the contemporary values. So it is for that particular reason that we sought
to open the museum for all generations and towards all forms of artistic
expression, with a view to creating a place, an environment where artists can manifest
themselves. And the fact that we succeeded to mount a creative museum, that only
enhanced our institution’s museum identity. The National Museum of
Romanian Literature is a museum where you can do a
lot more than merely looking at the exhibits, it is a living space. We have sought to
find our own identity through opening the museum to everybody and we did that because
people wanted a place like this, a place where they could express themselves.
It is a place where you’re sure to always find something new, where each and every
guest can put to good use their talent and erudition, qualities that seem to be
missing in our society, more and more. What we have been meaning to achieve and,
at that, I hope we have succeeded, is to contribute, through our activities, to
the lay public’s getting closer to writing, to reading, we want to encourage
reading, we want to contribute to the education of those who visit us.

The
National Museum of Romanian Literature also sought to maintain the connection
with the public during the pandemic, so they created a platform, Cultura in
direct, Live Culture, in English. The Director of the National Museum of
Romanian Literature, Ioan Cristescu:

We built this video platform, Live Culture, by means of which we dovetailed
the site of the museum and our activities. Our intention was to go online,
gradually, but also to move to television transmission. As you can see, most of
the debates in our society are not debates focusing on the problems we think are
important, or on cultural issues. We have been witnessing, oftentimes,
political debates, but we, the people of the National Museum of Romanian Literature,
are not interested in politics. What we’re interested in are debates of ideas,
the literary and interdisciplinary debates, as the writer and their literature
are also the outcome of what is going on in contemporary society, that is why
we have been trying to make the connection, to find connections between literature
and other disciplines.

(Translation by Eugen Nasta)

25 December 2021
The Soleil de L’Est Artist Residence

A new exhibition of the Soleil de LEst Association opened in the Media Hall of the Bucharest National Theater. This event is the Bucharest stage of the Soleil de LEst Artist Residence in Luynes, France. It brings together works by contemporary Romanian painters who took part in artist residencies hosted by the association between 2001 and 2021. These works were made upon the return from France, reflecting the experience of taking part in the residencies. We spoke to one of the curators of the exhibition, Valentin Tanase, about the Soleil de LEst Association, about the exhibition itself, and the artists present there:

“This exhibition is organized by the Soleil de LEst Association, which works mostly in France, inviting there fine artists from Romania for creative purposes, in artist residencies, with the ability and possibility of witnessing and getting information in major French cultural venues. The exhibition covers the work of 65 contemporary artists of all ages. There are senior artists, artists at their peak, but also emerging young artists who are seeking to find their way. We also have works by artists who have left us over the last year, and we wanted to pay them homage here. The exhibition is extremely varied, because the artists come from various areas and environments. Each one has their own style, they each express themselves with maximum earnestness. There is no restriction in terms of style, genre, technique, but I would say what ties it all together is the sincerity of the creative act. These would be the coordinates of this exhibition, eclectic, like any collective exhibition, but which covers the entire palette of contemporary Romanian art.”

Valentin Tanase disclosed to us things behind the scenes of such exhibitions, and about the artists who took part in the Soleil de LEst Association creative camps:

“Organizing an exhibition is a special activity, with special coordinates. First, we have to secure an exhibition space. At the same time, even if we gave to the artists the possibility of bringing in any work of theirs, a curator has to know how to organize them, to harmonize them chromatically, stylistically, which is not always easy. Of course, each piece of art has to be emphasized, and, because each artist has their pride, we have to find a solution for their art to be given attention, so that another artist doesnt eclipse them. This is a delicate and time consuming task, it takes patience, and some dexterity. I was told that over 100 artists, many of them major names in contemporary Romanian art, went to France under the aegis of the Soleil de LEst Association. Many of the exhibitions were in France, because the association has been maintaining contact with cultural entities in France, with town halls, cultural centers and organizations, to find exhibition spaces. At the same time, the association has published several art albums, and gave exposure in the media to these exhibitions and artists. The association is concerned with promoting Romanian art in Western Europe, in addition to the exhibitions, which are a big part of this promotional activity.”

We asked Valentin Tanase to describe a residency:

“First of all, artists are invited in French areas of artistic, cultural, and historical intensity, where other artists have been creating, which inspired luminaries of world art, where they find landmarks of historic artistic creation. At the same time, these camps are places where artists connect, people who might not see each other otherwise. They give them an opportunity for dialog, for exchange of opinions, of enriching each other with their experience. The Soleil de LEst Association has a permanent collection of works by many contemporary artists, and they are taken all over the continent as itinerant exhibitions, not just in France.”

Fine artist Victor Dima, one of the three curators of the exhibition, also spoke to us about these residencies:

“We gathered together artists who took part along the years in the camps, and each artist picked the work that they considered representative for the present moment in their creation. We had exhibitions in the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and the public in Western Europe had the opportunity to meet with artists from Eastern Europe, with their work, and get to know the concerns of fine art in this area of Europe. The artists are provided living space, materials, and the opportunity for research in those areas, or even more remote ones. We contact local artists, people exchange impressions, and during the residency they work outdoors or in the workshops, according to everyones way of working, allowing them to express themselves as best represents them.”

Victor Dima also spoke to us about the pandemic, and the effect on creation it had:

“There are two points of view, which I would say are diametrically opposed. On the one hand, we were affected by the pandemic just like everyone else, but artistically I would say it was a boon, in the sense that artists had more time to create, being forced to stay in their workshops more, instead of spreading themselves into other activities that interfere with creative work. The fact that we have works that I consider of very high quality proved that the pandemic, even though it has affected us as people, brought us some benefits as artists.”

18 December 2021
Critic Magda Mihăilescu, winner of the Gopo Special Award

Film critic Magda Mihăilescu was honored at the 15th edition of the Gopo Awards Gala with the Special Award for her exceptional career in the world of film. A graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy, the Journalism Department of the University of Bucharest, she is a member of the Romanian Filmmakers Union and the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI). Magda Mihăilescu has been a film critic since 1964. She wrote the film reviews in Flacăra magazine, then in the newspaper Informația Bucureștiului, until 1982, when she was removed from the press. After 1990 she returned to the press and between 1991 and 2005 she wrote the film section of the newspaper Adevărul and the film page ‘Traveling of the magazine Adevărul Literar şi Artistic.

Between 2005 and 2008 she authored the film reviews of the newspaper Gândul. Since 2005 she has been a freelancer, publishing in the online newspaper DCNEWS, the online magazine of the Aarc Filmmakers Union and the Italian film magazine Otto e mezzo. She made her editorial debut in 1969, with the Sophia Loren monograph (Meridiane Publishing House), then she made studies in the history of cinema and wrote essays in collective volumes. She signed, together with another four European critics, the volume Guardare in faccia il male, Lucian Pintilie fra cinema e teatro (Italy, Pesaro, 2004).

She is the author of the books These Giocondas Without a Smile – Conversations with Malvina Urșianu (Curtea Veche Publishing House, 2006), François Truffaut – The Man Who Loved Movies (Curtea Veche Publishing House, 2009), My sister from Australia – Past meetings with Irina Petrescu (Union of Filmmakers Publishing House, 2019). She coordinated, together with Cristina Corciovescu, the volumes The Ten Best Romanian Films of All Time (Polirom Publishing House, 2010) and From Comrade Ceaușescu to Mr. Lăzărescu (Polirom Publishing House, 2011). In 2009, after the release of the volume about François Truffaut, the critic Alex Leo Șerban wrote in Dilema magazine: To my taste, Magda Mihailescu’s book, François Truffaut – The Man who Loved Movies, is the best book about movies ever written in Romanian.

We talked to Magda Mihăilescu about her passion for François Truffaut, which began with The Four Hundred Blows / Les quatre cents coups, which she saw shortly after the premiere: “François Truffaut shocked me, he marked me in a certain period. I was at the beginning of my career when I discovered him. I was impressed with the way he built his career. And I mean his career as cinema personality, not just as filmmaker, because Truffaut – as is well known – was involved in film criticism, he was one of the angriest French critics, who brought a new perspective in the evaluation of the French film. I was intrigued, seduced by this transition in his career, from the fussy, angry critic, from the one who buried the French cinema, as he was known at the time, to a demure critic, almost classic, but who subversively disturbed the waters of modernity. I was interested in how he built his career as a cinema personality, starting from the condition of critic and becoming the most important French filmmaker after the war. Whether we accept it or not, this is the truth. Maybe Jean-Luc Godard, to mention a much more spectacular character in the world of cinema, built a school. Truffaut did not build a school, but he remains the one and only Truffaut, many dream of reaching the end of that path which he reached. I was impressed by the complexity of his condition. Although I did not meet him – this was one of the paradoxes of my life, I met great filmmakers but not Truffaut – I learned from everything I read and heard from those around him that he was also very humane, that he was not only a charming, but also very generous person. Many young French filmmakers made their debut with financial support from Truffaut, but Truffaut never mentioned it. I was impressed by the complexity of this filmmaker and by the way he built his career.

Throughout her career, Magda Mihăilescu has conducted exclusive interviews for Romania with great film personalities such as Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, Ennio Morricone, Andrzej Wajda, Orson Welles, Laurence Harvey, Marco Bellocchio, Claude Lelouch, André Téchiné, Fanny Ardant, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Emir Kusturica.

Here is Magda Mihăilescu with details about the meeting with Federico Fellini: The meeting with Federico Fellini was a miracle. I was in Rome when he was filming Amarcord at the Cinecittà studio. And I can say that I was lucky enough to be quite young and resilient, because, when I got the approval to attend the filming sessions, I was told that no one could recommend me to Fellini. They said I could take a seat somewhere on the premises, as Fellini is filming day and night, and I was supposed to hang on as long as I could, and if Fellini noticed me, he was to come and talk to me. It was indeed a test of endurance and, after two days, Fellini approached me, he asked me what I was doing, why I was there. And that’s how I happened to be involved in this miracle of seeing Fellini at work. It’s hard to talk about it, but when I wrote the report after the filming, I did manage to put something on paper. It’s hard to talk about Fellini and portray him in words because he was playing all the time, he was playing on the set, with the extras, and with everyone who watched the shooting. He was filming a winter scene in the middle of summer, obviously with artificial snow, and he had come dressed in his coat, we were wearing summer clothes, as it was June. And he came to ask us how we could resist, why we were not cold. Unfortunately, I did not immediately enter his game, to pretend that I was cold, to understand that I realized that the reality invented by Fellini was stronger at that moment than the meteorological reality. This was Federico Fellini. He was said to be a sorcerer, and indeed he was a sorcerer. Watching him at work was probably the highest moment of my encounter with the miracle of the birth of cinema. (LS)

11 December 2021
NeoNlitic 3.0

The autumn
of 2021 brought with it the 3rd edition of an international
cultural, documentary, historical and art exhibition by contemporary artists called NeoNlitic
3.0, which aims to bring closer together the shared pre-historic cultures of 3
countries-Romania, Serbia and Greece. We talked to one of the initiators of the
project, the Romanian artist Andrei Cornea:

Andrei
Cornea: This
edition of NeoNlitic is designed to take further the exploration of Neolithic
cultures on the territories of Romania and neighbouring countries, Serbia and
Greece this time. While in the first 2 editions we traced back the Hamangia and
Cucuteni cultures in Romania, this year we have documented and found
inspiration in the Starčevo-Körös-Criș and Vinca cultures in Romania and Serbia,
and in Greece we looked at the Sesklo culture, the forerunner of the Starčevo-Körös-Criș
culture. In other words, we set out to bring to the forefront works of art roughly
having the same source of inspiration, but produced by artists with different
backgrounds.

Another initiator
of this project, artist Daniel Loagăr, told us more about the concept behind NeoNlitic:

Daniel
Loagăr: NeoNlitic
suggests different solutions to the same challenge: a shared history. It has to
do with the dawn of mankind, the emergence of modern man, and the beginnings of
art. We didn’t try to copy the motifs of that period, but rather we innovated
using modern materials and techniques, drawing parallels and building bridges
between past and present, past and future. This was the challenge of the
artists involved in the project-embracing and showcasing their origins using
their own techniques and methods of working.

Daniel
Loagăr also gave us details about some of the works included in this year’s
selection:

Daniel
Loagăr: This year NeoNlitic 3.0 benefitted from an eclectic selection of
artists and works. We had video animations by Daniel Florea (Romania) and
Georgia Orfanidou (Greece), a short film by a Serbian artist; a performance by
another Serbian artist, who took part in 2 of the exhibitions in the project. We
also had ceramic sculptures by artists from all 3 countries, lots of light installations,
lithographs, fluorescent mix-media, paintings and the like. Some of the most
impressive works included NeoNlitic Tomb by Alexandru Răduță, a video animation
by Florea Alexandru Daniel, entitled The Anatomy of Existence; a light
installation by the Greek artist Yannis Didaskalou; a fluorescent sculpture
installation called Hommo Geometricus by Valentin Soare; artist Vlad Basarab’s
ceramic sculpture called Dark Metal; a video called NeoNlitic Ladies by
Darko Trajanovic; a media mix called Geological Section by Ion Alexandru. There
were also interactive installations, for instance Alex Manea imagined what a
music instrument might have looked like in the Stone Age and manufactured one. The
work, entitled Litophone, was on display in this project and the public were
able to interact with this installation.

Daniel
Loagăr also detailed some of the stages of the research process for the
project:

Daniel
Loagăr: The research for this year’s edition included both a history and archaeology
part, namely visits to archaeology sites and museums, and an artistic side,
with meetings with local artists, visits to art galleries and museums. In Romania
we started from sites in the Alba Iulia region, most importantly the one in Tărtăria,
which is famous for the engraved tables assumed to be a form of proto-writing. We
followed the Vinca and Starčevo-Criș cultures in Serbia, and in Novi Sad we
visited local art galleries and a contemporary art museum. We spent 5 days in
Belgrade, visiting the Archaeology Museum, the Zepter Museum, X-vitamin Gallery,
and met with one of the artists, Milorad Stajcic. Back to Romania, we visited a
fabulous site, Lepesnski Vir, where traces were discovered of the first human
settlement in Europe and the first monumental sculptures in Europe.

At the
end of our talk, Andrei Cornea told us about the places reached by the
NeoNlitic exhibition:

Andrei
Cornea: We first took our exhibition to the National Museum in Zrenjanin,
Serbia. Next came Romania, where we had the exhibition hosted by an art gallery
in Timișoara (west), and the last leg was in Thessaloniki, Greece. We are
having talks about further locations to take it, but for the time being we will
not make any public announcements, it will be a surprise. Most likely a
selection of the works from all 3 editions will be on display in the near
future in Brașov (central Romania). (tr. A.M. Popescu)

4 December 2021
NeoNlitic 3.0

The autumn
of 2021 brought with it the 3rd edition of an international
cultural, documentary, historical and art exhibition by contemporary artists called NeoNlitic
3.0, which aims to bring closer together the shared pre-historic cultures of 3
countries-Romania, Serbia and Greece. We talked to one of the initiators of the
project, the Romanian artist Andrei Cornea:

Andrei
Cornea: This
edition of NeoNlitic is designed to take further the exploration of Neolithic
cultures on the territories of Romania and neighbouring countries, Serbia and
Greece this time. While in the first 2 editions we traced back the Hamangia and
Cucuteni cultures in Romania, this year we have documented and found
inspiration in the Starčevo-Körös-Criș and Vinca cultures in Romania and Serbia,
and in Greece we looked at the Sesklo culture, the forerunner of the Starčevo-Körös-Criș
culture. In other words, we set out to bring to the forefront works of art roughly
having the same source of inspiration, but produced by artists with different
backgrounds.

Another initiator
of this project, artist Daniel Loagăr, told us more about the concept behind NeoNlitic:

Daniel
Loagăr: NeoNlitic
suggests different solutions to the same challenge: a shared history. It has to
do with the dawn of mankind, the emergence of modern man, and the beginnings of
art. We didn’t try to copy the motifs of that period, but rather we innovated
using modern materials and techniques, drawing parallels and building bridges
between past and present, past and future. This was the challenge of the
artists involved in the project-embracing and showcasing their origins using
their own techniques and methods of working.

Daniel
Loagăr also gave us details about some of the works included in this year’s
selection:

Daniel
Loagăr: This year NeoNlitic 3.0 benefitted from an eclectic selection of
artists and works. We had video animations by Daniel Florea (Romania) and
Georgia Orfanidou (Greece), a short film by a Serbian artist; a performance by
another Serbian artist, who took part in 2 of the exhibitions in the project. We
also had ceramic sculptures by artists from all 3 countries, lots of light installations,
lithographs, fluorescent mix-media, paintings and the like. Some of the most
impressive works included NeoNlitic Tomb by Alexandru Răduță, a video animation
by Florea Alexandru Daniel, entitled The Anatomy of Existence; a light
installation by the Greek artist Yannis Didaskalou; a fluorescent sculpture
installation called Hommo Geometricus by Valentin Soare; artist Vlad Basarab’s
ceramic sculpture called Dark Metal; a video called NeoNlitic Ladies by
Darko Trajanovic; a media mix called Geological Section by Ion Alexandru. There
were also interactive installations, for instance Alex Manea imagined what a
music instrument might have looked like in the Stone Age and manufactured one. The
work, entitled Litophone, was on display in this project and the public were
able to interact with this installation.

Daniel
Loagăr also detailed some of the stages of the research process for the
project:

Daniel
Loagăr: The research for this year’s edition included both a history and archaeology
part, namely visits to archaeology sites and museums, and an artistic side,
with meetings with local artists, visits to art galleries and museums. In Romania
we started from sites in the Alba Iulia region, most importantly the one in Tărtăria,
which is famous for the engraved tables assumed to be a form of proto-writing. We
followed the Vinca and Starčevo-Criș cultures in Serbia, and in Novi Sad we
visited local art galleries and a contemporary art museum. We spent 5 days in
Belgrade, visiting the Archaeology Museum, the Zepter Museum, X-vitamin Gallery,
and met with one of the artists, Milorad Stajcic. Back to Romania, we visited a
fabulous site, Lepesnski Vir, where traces were discovered of the first human
settlement in Europe and the first monumental sculptures in Europe.

At the
end of our talk, Andrei Cornea told us about the places reached by the
NeoNlitic exhibition:

Andrei
Cornea: We first took our exhibition to the National Museum in Zrenjanin,
Serbia. Next came Romania, where we had the exhibition hosted by an art gallery
in Timișoara (west), and the last leg was in Thessaloniki, Greece. We are
having talks about further locations to take it, but for the time being we will
not make any public announcements, it will be a surprise. Most likely a
selection of the works from all 3 editions will be on display in the near
future in Brașov (central Romania). (tr. A.M. Popescu)

2 December 2021