Meet five emerging female filmmakers at the beginning of their journey. I sought them out after seeing their films at the Transilvania International Film Festival, selected in one of the best short film competitions (in the Romanian Days section) of the festival in recent years, which was dominated by women. We talked about their quests, their uncertainties, their student years – which, for most of them, coincided with the pandemic period –, their films, and the impact these complicated years have had on their lives and work. After their first experiences in directing, they even put together an informal “job description”: focus, empathy, and great skills in multitasking, but above all, a good director must also be a good storyteller. I have listened to their stories and I dare say this much – this group deserves all the attention.

***

Lucia Chicoș, 25, film director

Before Berliner Kindl, Lucia Chicoș was convinced she knew what kind of films she would make throughout her career.

Her first and most powerful childhood memory about a film was at the age of 5 when she watched The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (dir. Cristi Puiu, 2005) from beginning to end on TV. She was impressed with how much a film can captivate you and the universe it creates before your eyes. Growing up, she developed an interest and curiosity for cinema, but she was introduced to art films in high school when she read Things that Cannot Be Said Otherwise: A way to think about cinema, from André Bazin to Cristi Puiu by Andrei Gorzo. She describes it as a personal revolution: “It opened my eyes to the depth and complexity of cinema, its connections to philosophy, psychology, and literature – all interconnecting into a meaningful whole.”

She was drawn to neorealist aesthetics, which she further studied in depth at the UNATC (i.e. National University of Theatre and Film “Ion Luca Caragiale”), where she spent a lot of time around Professor Sorin Botoșeneanu and other colleagues of his, with whom she felt part of a community, of a creed. Lucia says she found something noble in the humanism of neorealism. This type of cinema with its mystery, tenderness, and relativism had a therapeutic effect on her, and she felt it was her visceral form of expression.

Two years ago, when the idea of making a short film about a love story in the midst of a pandemic emerged, Lucia was in the second year of her master’s degree in film directing and was going through a period of anxiety and insecurities.

“It’s quite common among UNATC students,” says Lucia with a slight smile. “At first you are very excited, feeling special and driven to prove yourself. Then comes the sophomore’s depression, as we call it, when you begin to feel discouraged and realise that it’s harder than you imagined, that nobody gets it right the first time.”

Lucia, too, didn’t feel very confident about her earlier work, despite her first films being selected in festivals and receiving acclaim. Even when her graduation film, Contraindications, won third place in the Cinéfondation section at the Cannes Film Festival, she still felt a mix of joy and extra pressure. She thought, as she had often heard around her, that the hard part was just beginning.

Berliner Kindl was a project made with friends, with equipment from UNATC and a budget of about 400 euros. The script was a collaborative work between Lucia, Emil Vasilache, with whom she had collaborated on her previous shorts, Andra Gheorghiu, the film’s producer, who came with the idea for the project, and Anca Munteanu, the lead actress, who fit the character so well and became part of the creative process. Together they built a story that follows Raluca, a bike courier navigating traffic in a Bucharest hit by the pandemic, whose life takes an idyllic turn after meeting Dragoș, a new customer.

“This project ignited in me a desire to experiment in ways I hadn’t done before as a student.” While she describes her previous films as “high-stakes family dramas”, with Berliner Kindl, she had the courage to explore new stylistic forms and make a film that she might have previously labeled as “light”. In this new process, Lucia discovered that the overarching story became less about the technical aspects and framing and more about understanding her characters. New questions began to concern her: “How do I see people?”, “How do I relate to the audience?”, “What do I bring to the table in dialogue with the audience?”.

Lucia now feels more curious and open-minded, and she no longer knows what kind of films she wants to make. “And I’m so glad I don’t know!,” she says. She believes that ultimately all her films are authentic expressions of herself, even if they have different facets, and that any film can have that humanism, which she initially found in neorealism. The important thing is to find the power to empathise. Because the role of cinema, as she understands it now, is to give us the chance to learn something about ourselves and about others. Despite the pressure and anxiety that come with the filmmaking process, there are moments that nourish her and make her feel alive.

“Berliner Kindl” was screened at the Transilvania International Film Festival, where it received Special Mention in the Romanian Days’ Short Film section, and at Filmul de Piatra, where it won the Audience Award and Special Mention in the Fiction section. The film will also run at Anonimul IFF (August 14-20). In the words of film critic Călin Boto, “essays could be written about the silences in Lucia Chicoș’s films. Late or not, they were revelations to me.”

***

Alexandra Diaconu, 25, film editor

For Alexandra Diaconu, 2012 was a milestone year as her life changed dramatically following the events that set her upon her present path. She was in the tenth grade, living in Bârlad, “a town where nothing much happens,” when she found out about this association that organised documentary film workshops for high school students. At that time, she associated documentaries with those programs about penguins and whales shown on the Discovery Channel, but what excited her about the whole experience was the novelty of the project, the opportunity to tell a visual story, and the collaboration with the organisers – a group of young people who came to her hometown trying to impact the local community through educational projects. For two weeks, Alexandra went out there with her camera, did interviews, learned to edit short clips using VLC, and created her first film, a documentary about an alternative rock band from Bârlad.

“No one had told me until then and I would never have imagined that I could do something like that,” says Alexandra. “It was the kind of encounter that could change your entire path.”

And it did change her path. Since then, Alexandra started experimenting with her father’s video camera, which had been mostly unused at home until it became “an extension of myself”. “The camera became my way of communicating,” says Alexandra. “It helped me open up, get to know myself better.” She kept video diaries until college. She would film herself for hours, in the privacy of her room, or with her friends, when they went outside to play, or when she studied for exams, or on occasions when the video came out shaky, like when she called her parents to tell them that she had failed the entrance exam at UNATC.

Family also became the center of the universe captured by her camera. Started out as a play and out of curiosity, it became a means of getting closer and connecting with her loved ones. Alexandra discovered that through her camera she had access to stories and emotions that were difficult to express otherwise. “The camera was our way of talking, we could say things without saying them,” she explains. It gave her courage, and she used it whenever she felt that images held more power than words. Most recently, at her grandfather’s funeral.

Just like she did on other important family occasions, Alexandra filmed the event without any plan or expectations. While doing so, she felt there was a story there worth telling, and out came Whole Family, a documentary that follows her family during the days of mourning, exploring themes such as farewell and detachment. “Filming protected me from the event itself,” shares Alexandra. “You feel that it doesn’t hit you as hard as if you were present, sitting and thinking about your sadness.”

Throughout the process, Alexandra handled almost everything: editing, sound, directing. She learned how vital it is not to be alone in this endeavor, that sometimes it’s difficult to find the right structure and rhythm, that it’s important how you manage the parents’ expectations, and that it’s key to know how to distance yourself from a personal story. The support of her colleague and editor, Maria Bălănean, played a significant role, as well as the discussions she had with other filmmakers after showing the film. The most sincere reactions came at the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF), on both screening days, where there were moments of laughter and silence among the audience, and the experience overwhelmed her.

Although the camera has given her a lot, Alexandra doesn’t plan to direct other films anytime soon. It’s editing that captivated her from the beginning and which she wants to further pursue. After attending their program in high school, Alexandra stayed in touch with the VIRA association, which encouraged and supported her in applying to UNATC for the second time, and now she is part of the team and a trainer at the documentary film workshops they organise. She smiles every time a kid attending the course tells her about the animal documentaries they saw.

“Whole Family” was screened at the Transilvania International Film Festival, where it received Special Mention in the Romanian Days’ Short Film section, and at Filmul de Piatra, where it won the award for Best Documentary. }n her analysis of the Romanian short film competition at the festival, Flavia Dima wrote that it is “a quite uncomfortable film with brimming gallows humor, in which the concept of voyeurism reaches some unimaginable heights (see the sequences in which the body of the dead man is shown to some faraway relatives via Facetime).”

***

Andreea Lăcătuș, 30, film director

When she first thought that she no longer wanted to be a filmmaker, Andreea Lăcătuș felt disoriented. It was during her first year of master’s when she wanted to take some distance from this world, after feeling more and more like she didn’t belong in the previous years as a student at UNATC. Various feelings overwhelmed her: the high expectations from those around her, the new experience of filming that pumped her with anxiety, and the advice she received from some teachers who only added more pressure: “Think of it as your last film!” She constantly felt like she was in a competition, and down this dark corridor, Andreea felt that she had not only lost her direction but also the enthusiasm she had when she entered film school.

So, for a while, she “ran away” from filmmaking. She, along with two other like-minded colleagues, founded an association through which they aimed to develop artistic and educational programs in marginalised communities. They named it the inCAP Association. Andreea was armed with ideas; she already had a background in cultural projects: as a child, she played the mandolin and had her own concerts, wrote poetry, and in high school, she recalls experimenting with various things – once she staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a setting animated by video projections, “which seemed like a super-innovation in Buzău,” Andreea laughs. She never felt as free as she did in those years.

For four years, they organised various projects – film workshops, theater performances, and readings with writers – in an remote village in Ialomița. The village was 20 km from the city, but there was no public transport to get there, so many students would spend a lot of money on taxi rides to go to school, hitchhike, or wouldn’t go at all. The workshops organised by the association aimed to bring new perspectives to these children, giving them the chance to dream, and sometimes it reflected in better school results. But the reality on the ground is always much harsher. When Andreea saw an eighth-grade girl crying because she wanted to go to school, she realised that everything was so fragile and that these communities needed more than just some cultural interventions.

This revelation, the pandemic that interrupted the association’s activity in the community, and the period that followed, full of questions and uncertainties, convinced her to return to filmmaking. “I ran back, but in a different way than when I left,” says Andreea, smiling. The experience of working in the association and meeting people from the film industry helped her understand herself better, filter the stories she wanted to tell and, most importantly, regain her enthusiasm for this profession.

When producer Elena Martin invited her to work together on a script for a film about domestic violence, Andreea felt challenged but also more confident. Making Between the Edges of the Day presented her with many situations and decisions: from how to build relationships between characters narrative-wise and visually depict the traces of abuse to the dynamics of working with actors on the set, when a key character is a 10-year-old girl.

“I wanted as few visual artifices as possible. I tried to refrain from a thought-out, constructed aesthetic. I don’t know if that serves the film necessarily, but for me, it was a bet: how can I keep the story as simple as possible, precisely because its subject is so difficult?,” says the director.

It was the moment when Andreea felt that her experience in the NGO perfectly combined with the type of cinema that attracted her. She had seen many films about vulnerable communities, where the approach was rather exotic, which angered her. Her field experience had taught her that things were much more complicated than illustrated there and that it is more important to represent these communities with empathy and care.

It was the first time she felt she had found her place.

“Between the Edges of the Day” is produced by Manifest Film and was selected in the Short Film Competition at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival (August 15-23), after being shown earlier this summer at the Transilvania International Film Festival. In her short review, Flavia Dima describes the film as “a perfectly executed drama about a mother’s attempt to leave her abusive husband, led by an impeccable Andreea Grămoșteanu, which reads like a feminist guide to the challenges faced by a woman who finds herself in such a situation – from her hesitation to involve the authorities, to her strategies to exit and to rebuild her life, to her peers that downplay and normalize the abuse she is facing.”

***

Eszter Tompa, 39, actress

“An actor cannot exist only between home and the theater,” says Eszter Tompa, as she reflects on her own journey. “I didn’t want to become that actress stuck in one place, playing all the roles. I was more interested in exploring different work processes and what I could learn from them.”

That’s how she’s always been: curious, constantly on the move, seeking challenges. Like when she was living in Berlin and wanted to better understand what happens behind the camera, so she worked as a location manager and script consultant. Later, she started doing puppet theater because she found it the best way to explain complicated things like fake news to her child – and she even staged a themed show at the Gong Theater in Sibiu. When the pandemic put her projects on hold and she suddenly found herself in the dark, she felt the need for new avenues of expression, so she started a plan she had been thinking about for some time – to learn film directing.

Eszter wanted to be an actress from a young age. She grew up in Târgu-Mureș, in a family deeply immersed in theater. Her grandmother, Gaby Mende, was a renowned local actress, who together with her husband, Tompa Miklós, founded the Mureș Institutional Theater in 1948. Eszter’s father, Gábor Tompa, is a theater director and the manager of the State Hungarian Theatre in Cluj-Napoca. Her family feared that the “name” would be a burden and she wouldn’t find her place, but Eszter didn’t give up on her dream.

A few people, such as actress Orsi Török-Illyés and director Szabi Hajdu, believed in her and encouraged her to pursue acting. Eszter got her first role early on in a feature film directed by Gyula Nemes. It all took off when she went to Germany, to attend the academy founded by David Esrig in Burghausen (Bavaria), where she learned almost everything she knows today about acting and which opened many doors to international productions. For quite a while, Eszter was involved in various television projects, films, workshops, and training sessions in different countries – she speaks, among others, Hungarian, German, English, French, and Catalan.

“It was either work or relationships that made me learn them,” says Eszter, smiling.

When she received an invitation to teach acting at the University of Arts in Târgu-Mureș, Eszter realised that the degree she obtained in Germany was not recognized in Romania. This happened at the same time when the pandemic left her with few options and a difficult breakup. “I felt stuck, in my own home, unable to express myself, not knowing how to set up a camera or edit.” As many times before, she would be saved by another challenge, which turned out to be the Faculty of Theatre and Film, Department of Cinematography and Media, at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca.

The story for her first student film stemmed from a personal curiosity. Oedipus’ Morning follows two friends who find themselves in a new situation and addresses the fear of attachment. “It started from a persona dilemma: Why is it that when something beautiful happens to me, when my heart opens a bit, I sabotage myself? I thought of situations through which I could express that,” explains Eszter.

Aesthetically speaking, the film is an experiment. Inspired by teacher and director Adrian Sitaru’s improvisational style, Eszter wanted a live filming exercise with the actors – almost all amateurs – without any rehearsal, with a script built from real-time lines sent on WhatsApp. “The whole idea was to create contradictory situations, to come as surprises, and to capture people’s reactions,” she says. “I felt like an invisible Puck who means well but pulls all sorts of pranks.”

Eszter believes that the themes that interest her also dictate the form. And she wants to tell stories she’s “afraid or ashamed to talk about.” While it may have seemed like a game, she feels that directing comes with immense responsibility.

With Oedipus’ Morning, Eszter Tompa won the Local Competition Award at the Transilvania International Film Festival, a section dedicated to amateur or professional filmmakers from Cluj.

***

Alma Buhagiar, 25, film director

As a child, Alma Buhagiar created a micro-universe in her bedroom, where she spent a lot of time by herself, watching films and drawing. She would fill pages with comic strips, sketching people and their stories. Her grandmother read her fairy tales, which she reinterpreted and adapted, fueling her appetite for stories and moving images. When she was 13, she saw Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and she remembers that the images stayed with her and kept her awake at night.

High school was a different story. It was her rebellious phase, she was a “punk”, as she calls it (in the eleventh grade, she skipped classes so many times that she was expelled), which she now looks back on with affection. “All my bravado back then came from a need for attention and love, but I understood that later,” Alma recounts. At that time, she began organising movie nights with her friends and wanted to write her own film script, even though she didn’t necessarily know how to do it. She attended the Let’s Go Digital film workshop for teenagers at the Transilvania International Film Festival, which was her first contact with people in the film industry. If until then, cinema was just a curiosity, after that she thought of making it a future plan.

Her first audiovisual exercise as a film student at UNATC was not well received, and it’s easy to lose confidence without guidance or support. Alma understood then how important it is for a student to be encouraged and helped to find their direction. She especially felt that after making a documentary about a priest, a former political prisoner (The Last Reverend), and someone told her, “You did well.”

In film, Alma found the medium that helps her express herself, say things she otherwise wouldn’t know how to say, and sometimes heal wounds from the past. “It’s also a therapeutic act,” she confesses. And that is evident in some of her work so far.

Together, which won the Best Film Award at the CineMAiubit International Student Film Festival in 2020, tells the story of a boy caught between two separated parents and their different worlds, who is trying to figure out his own identity.

Sentimental Education is also inspired by a personal story. Here, Alma was interested in capturing the portraits of authority figures who feel the need to control the lives of others. “I ran into this human need, the desire to exist through others, and I couldn’t help but feel that it’s such an act of aggression to tell someone else what to do, how to be,” she says. “It’s a rather ironic and caricatural film.”

Alma believes that the beauty of cinema is when it manages to turn our gaze towards important things – towards ourselves, history, the world – and makes us look at them with more empathy. “I think that the great power of a film lies in its ability to turn pain into something that can be looked at, into a revelation that becomes a testimony for something. It doesn’t change the world, but it can change the way we look at it. Perhaps more empathetically, it helps us broaden our view of the world,” explains the director.

After her experience at TIFF, where she was a contender alongside several female filmmakers and peers of her generation, Alma believes that the path is open for women in cinema. She feels people are more broad-minded, and even hough we don’t have a history of building communities, she hopes that her generation will change some of that mentality. “I feel that we can cooperate, that we can talk to each other about opportunities such as workshops, residencies, calls, and help each other grow,” says Alma. “We just need to be united.”

“Sentimental Education” will also be shown at the Romanian Film Evenings in Iași (August 9-13).

Anca Vancu

Journalist. She worked for ten years at Adevărul and DoR as a reporter and for a while in communication. At Films in Frame, she coordinates the whole team with Laure, while also editing some of the articles about the film industry, trying to always find interesting angles to tell a story.