Filmmaker Lina Vdovii’s father goes from being an aggressor within the four walls of his own home to becoming the victim of serious abuse on a vineyard in Italy. How can you help this struggling man, knowing that getting close to him again will rekindle the pain of unresolved past traumas?

Lina Vdovii’s documentary, co-directed with Radu Ciorniciuc (Acasă, My Home, 2020), is called Tata (Father) and is as personal as it gets: it captures moments of family intimacy, climbing the highest branches of the filmmaker’s family tree, without ever making it an explicitly collective affair. Implicitly, however, we end up seeing in this man’s drama a generational journey of post-communist transition, where the head of the family, used to maintaining law and order at home, finds himself straining his back at work abroad, unbeknownst to any of his loved ones, exploited in poor working conditions. Without looking outside its own yard – what’s inside is enough – Tata tells the story of many. It’s the story of those who came of age in a social order that would suddenly collapse, leaving their offspring in great uncertainty. It’s the story of trying to survive, clinging to the lifeline of old principles when everything around is faltering. In today’s parlance, we could see Tata as a film about toxic masculinity, forced to become vulnerable when it meets its match. Without resentment or condescension, Vdovii and Ciorniciuc expose the cogs of this rusty mechanism of self-defence against the times, which needs no justifications: they are diffusely scattered between the film’s main events, on the long, exhausting roads that separate Moldova from Italy, i.e. a periphery ignored by the new Europe’s economic centres.

Tata evolves in parallel with Otilia Babara’s 2022 documentary Love Is Not an Orange, which traced a collective history of Moldovan mothers forced to find work abroad, temporarily leaving their families behind. Vdovîi-Ciorniciuc’s film is also born from those grainy VHS tapes, where young innocent faces endearingly and naively recite poems to the absent parent. Vdoiîi herself is a child of the 1990s-2000s, confronted with a new reality – her father is far away, seeking a better life for the family – and, when it is her turn to be a mother, she is eager to do things differently. Mirroring the thesis of Babara’s film, at one point, as an adult, she explains to her father that money isn’t so important for a child; in a child’s eyes, poverty is a concept. Something else is needed for a happy childhood, not a handful of cash appearing out of nowhere.

How can you not agree with that? At the same time, how can you not understand the father, struggling to earn a living for the family, when perhaps all he needed to do was truly see his family, show them simple, genuine acts of love? But could it have been so simple? Between the daughter’s current (and updated) values, which we cannot help but share, and the father’s silent, repressed existential suffering, sacrificing himself in line with a mindset that may be outdated today but remains noble and entirely understandable, the film negotiates a tense balance where there’s no triumph. The result is contradictory, complex family portraits, with this pater familias at the centre – whom the filmmakers make us imagine as authoritarian, severe, and abusive, while simultaneously showing him diminished, brought to the verge of tears (and mental breakdown) by a corrupt Italian employer. The recurring scenes of physical violence at the workplace are jarring; in contrast, the father’s clumsy attempts at reconciliation and frustrated honesty are deeply unsettling. The character, torn between roles – from authority figure at home to second-class citizen in the fields – is extraordinary: hard to empathise with, but even harder to condemn. There is a great love between him and his daughter, but one that doesn’t know how to express itself.

Tata is very moving, yet never soppy (except for the overly lyrical voiceover). Credit goes to the directing duo, who, besides being excellent journalists, demonstrate an innate sense of the film’s rhythm. Starting as an investigative journalistic thriller, the documentary ends with a naive look towards the next generation. In the meantime, it completes the introspective loop propelled by the father’s desperate cry for help, showing that he can no longer cope. This stoic figure, who never gives in without regret, yet proves incapable of holding it all in, represents the film’s mystery, the cypher that no lens will ever fully crack. This performative masculinity, which refuses to be beaten down even when it is defeated, marks the distance separating the new generations from the way people used to understand life.

Neither nostalgic nor triumphalist, the film holds a fragile balance between all that is lost (parents worn down by brutal labour, grandparents who lived through monumental history) and all that is to come (the promise of the future symbolised by a pregnant belly that fills the frame – a beautiful figurative idea). Vdovii and Ciorniciuc have a great capacity to extrapolate. In the brief but impactful moments when a grandmother recounts an absurd death from long ago or when an aunt’s words echo stoically against what’s already been shown, Vdovii’s extended family becomes a kind of universe where women in particular, like an ancient chorus, summarise the general direction of society.

The film never fully blossoms into a more systemic investigation (for example, exploring the relationships between the father-protagonist and other seasonal workers on the vineyard). It wasn’t necessary, but it could have. A more explicitly political vein would have allowed it to question the solipsistic, voyeuristic attitude – a nearly inevitable feature of this increasingly widespread subgenre where the documentarian turns the camera on themselves, declaring their life worthy of everyone’s attention. But for anyone who expects more than identification or therapy from art, this limitation risks becoming alienating. On the other hand, no matter how saturated the market may be with intimate perspectives in the age of technological convenience, Tata stands out as an important account of a sphere, both geographic and mental – an Eastern European mindset written in the DNA – that is still finding itself. The existence of the Vdovii family deserves all our attention.

Tata opened the 31st edition of the Astra Film Festival (October 20-27, 2024) and is also screening at Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest (October 25 – November 3, 2024).

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.