After a summer diary from the Anonimul festival, I’m back with an autum diary, written at the foothills of the Făgăraș and Cibin mountains: I’m attending the 29th edition of the Astra international documentary film festival, the biggest event in Romania dedicated to non-fiction, which is also the festival with the longest uninterrupted run in the country’s post-Revolution history, that has left a lasting, undeniable imprint on local documentary film production.

Sunday, 9th of October

I arrive in Sibiu by train, a chance I take to watch the few short films that I had left to see in the DocSchool competition, which I have been invited to judge alongside Turkish filmmaker Emel Celebi – before the festival, I find out that she won’t be able to attend, due to visa problems. I’m a little worried that she won’t be here – the competition, with films from countries around Europe (and a few Romanian ones), has a consistently high level; although I’ve written down a few favorites, I can’t foretell how the awards will end up looking like. This comes on top of my perception of having an even greater responsibility than usual since we’ve been called to judge the works of students and emerging filmmakers. As for the festival’s selection – I already have a few films that I’ve already seen – Soy Libre, Children of the Mist, and Geographies of Solitude, all of them great, which further tickles my enthusiasm for this year’s edition.

After checking in at the hotel, I go for a small walk – an obligatory task in this city that keeps on calling me back, with its Saxonic streets, chic cafés, second-hand clothes shops with yellowed signs in their front windows, reading „new merchandise TODAY”, and its delicious local pastries. Shortly after, it’s time to attend the opening screening time, at the festival’s headquarters, the Thalia Hall. I take some time to observe the queue at the entrance: a coquettish crowd, with some notable intellectuals and filmmakers waiting in line – once inside, we’re greeted by the Taraf de Caliu band, an already-traditional presence at the festival.

But what follows is a shock that leaves me with a bitter aftertaste – and that’s in no way the fault of the opening film, The Chalice. Of Sons and Daughters, the debut film of anthropologist Cătălina Tesar, co-directed with editor Dana Bunescu (who once more demonstrates her great versatility as a filmmaker), had its international premiere in Sarajevo this summer. This is its national premiere, and from the introductory speech, we gather that the Astra festival was one of the catalysts for the documentary. At its core, the film is a tragedy, directed with a great amount of sensitivity and empathy: following the lives of two young cortorar Roma, living in an arranged marriage, over the course of almost a decade. The couple is under constant pressure from their families to have a male child, in order to obey the rules of the community – rules which are dominated by the so-called Tahtai, the titular chalices, which are family symbols that dictate their social status/rank within the community, that are exchanged between families when a marriage takes place, and can only be returned once a boy is born in the new couple.

No, my shock is due to the reactions of the audience that was present at the screening: despite being aware that both the directors and the protagonists were in attendance, that didn’t stop them from exercising a modicum of self-control in hiding their racist and classist impulses. Some laughed as if the film were slapstick comedy, during scenes that proved how immature they were –  for example, one where one of the characters gets an unfortunate result on their fertility test, or one when naive reproductive health advice is given, or a scene in which some animals are breeding, or whenever the old patriarch of the family is obsessing over the family chalice, and even a scene in which the characters are eating sunflower seeds! I left as soon as the lights came on – I didn’t want to hear what questions such an audience might ask (and later discussions proved that my instinct was right: someone asked the protagonist how many years she had spent in school, my goodness!). The reactions that I witnessed were completely antithetical to what any festival, any documentary filmmaker would wish for – mockery instead of empathy, contempt instead of understanding, a false sense of superiority (nothing but the most miserable form of intellectual and moral mediocrity) instead of understanding. I look over my notes from the film – “I’m glad for you, the bourgeois of Sibiu, with your privilege of having been educated about reproductive health, your privilege to not carry forced pregnancies and to not marry as teenagers; I’m glad this film was a comedy for you”. And I was seriously thinking, what’s the point of all of our efforts when one can see that an audience is even capable of such reactions? I end the evening with my colleague Andreea Chiper, breaking all this stuff down over beer.

Monday, 10th of October

I wake up with slightly calmer thoughts after yesterday evening: I take my morning walk, do a bit of work, then join Andreea and her gang of friends to see The Pawnshop (dir. Łukasz Kowalski, main photo), one of the films that struck me unmissable after reading the synopsis: a film about Poland’s biggest second-hand store, i.e. a must-see for a religious thrift store shopper. From the very first scene – a long single shot in which the owner, Wiesek, argues over the phone with an unsatisfied customer while blowing up balloons – I knew that I made the right choice. Kowalski explores this labyrinth of an emporium, with over 70,000(!) items up for sale, where you can find literally anything – from clothes to crockery, electronics, and sporting goods to hunting trophies. And then there are the people who handle this enormous amount of stuff: from the eccentric and his partner Jola, with her sharp red nails and fur coats, to the other employees, all of whom carry the burden of difficult pasts (marked by abusive relationships and poverty). Between the chain-smoking of cigarettes and experiments where they test whether their appliances are functional (including a hilarious moment featuring a microwave oven – “Oh my God, we’re getting it! “), the portrait of an informal community center emerges, where alternative mutual support networks are born between the neighborhood’s most distressed residents and the employees, who are also informal social workers and psychologists (even among themselves). A hilarious, touching film, that turns the shop at 1 Perseverance Street (!) into a universally-relateable space.

After lunch at Sala Thalia, I go for the evening screenings at the mall (as unpleasant as it is to walk through one on your way to the cinema, I must say the screening quality there is really good): starting with Renato Borrayo Serrano’s Life of Ivanna. A portrait of a very harsh life in the depths of the Siberian tundra centered on the titular Ivanna, a woman from the Nenets community, who, with a cigarette constantly on the edge of her mouth (a lot of smoking happening in today’s films), raises five young children on her own in a mobile shack pulled by a sled of reindeers, without electricity or running water. As hard, even tragic as the protagonist’s life is – who fell pregnant as a teenager, with a husband who has since become an abusive alcoholic – it’s hard to relate to her through the feeling of pity: the sheer force of her character (among other things, she’s the community’s best reindeer handler) eludes, even repels pity, inspiring admiration instead. Nor do the gorgeous, haunting Siberian landscapes exert as much pull and fascination as Ivanna does, both in her moments of strife as well as in those of liberation – and there’s such beauty in the scene when she lets herself go, set to the rhythm of a song by Kino. The second film of the evening – Waves on Dry Soil, Raluca David’s debut – leaves me puzzled: a portrait of a surfer from the Republic of Moldova that, beyond the obvious charisma of the protagonist, conveys little to nothing and fails to cohere into a discourse on any of the topics that it opens (the inefficiency of Eastern European Olympic committees, the status of an immigrant speaking multiple languages, the life of an athlete who is constrained by geography). Maybe the best way to describe this indecisive film is to point out that, for a film about a surfer, it has surprisingly few scenes in which we can actually see him surfing.

Tuesday, 11th of October

Another day that begins at the Astra Cinema in the Little Square, with the morning screening – of Who We Will Have Been, an essay-film directly related to this edition’s central theme, Eternal Love (which also includes Fire of Love, which I’ll see tonight, and Marianne & Leonard, tomorrow). Certainly the toughest of the bunch, in terms of subject matter: the documentary deals with the death of the filmmaker’s girlfriend in a car accident (in which he was also a victim; both are credited as co-directors of the film) in three chapters — that of the relationship itself, the mourning/recovery period, and finally, the “present moment”. It’s a film that goes deep not only into the emotional elements of this situation (their relationship was indeed a very loving one, making things all the more tragic: “How easy it was to make her happy,” the director muses at one point) but also into the darkest of corners (moments of regret, the onset of trauma and suicidal ideation after the accident, cries for help, physical recovery). But, above all, the film is interesting for its eclectic, even playful visual approach: an unusual mix of screenshots that underpin the chronology of events (culled from apps like Tinder, WhatsApp, Google Calendar, and, in a surprisingly candid moment, Reddit and Imgur), archival footage that sometimes tests various techniques (slow-mo, timelapse, fisheye and littleworld) and utilitarian imagery (MRIs and X-rays, press photos from the scene of the accident). Although a little long-winded in the final part, Who We Will Have Been is certainly an intriguing, poignant document of the mourning process in the modern age, where our existences leave infinitely more traces behind than ever before.

After lunch, I head to the mall for the screening of Brotherhood – the kind of seductive documentary with a fictional feeling to it (edited as such, shot with MultiCam, lots of close-ups), about the lives of three brothers in Bosnia, ethnic Muslims growing up without a mother, whose father is sentenced to two years prison for participating in the actions of the Islamic State. Before leaving, in a scene that recalls a biblical parable or fairy tale, the father gives each pf the three sons a task that they will have to perform while he is imprisoned: the eldest will take care of the (financial) upkeep of the household, the second-oldest will look after the sheepfold, and the youngest will devote himself to studying at the madrassa, the Muslim religious school. Of course, the tasks aren’t as easy as they might seem, and the three boys are as different as can be: the first-born longs for an “ordinary” life, the middle-born is the most loyal and obedient towards his father, and the youngest, caught in the throes of puberty, is the only one that has a critical attitude (for example, he is the only one who wonders aloud “What was my father doing there [in Syria]?”). Abounding in resplendent, metaphorical imagery, Brotherhood is a very enchanting film – which, of course, opens it up for questioning on ethical grounds (especially concerning whether the protagonists are portrayed honestly or in an exploitative manner, but also in regards to whether it ends up over-humanizing an unrepentant former ISIL collaborator).

After dinner, I return to Cine Gold for Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love – one of the most hyped documentaries of the year, judging by its huge track record, which includes festivals like Sundance, SXSW, Visions du Reel, and CPH:DOX – an archival film (with occasional animated inserts) about the most famous couple of volcanologists in history, Katie and Maurice Krafft. And, indeed, the film is absolutely mesmerizing: the footage shot and photographed by the Kraffts, who ventured to the most dangerous active volcanoes in the world between the 1970s and 1991 (the year of their death in an eruption of Japan’s Mount Unzen), is outright hypnotic – from shots of the two, in their Teutonic-knight-meets-aliens protective suits, as they’re walking right on the edge of active eruptions, to shots in which lava explosions stretch out across the screen like in a Jackson Pollock painting. Dosa narrates the lives of the two French scientists in a text that often has poetic notes and observations – illustrating, for example, how their work was also a way of seeking refuge in the natural world during the bleak post-war years in Europe, a refuge that also resulted from a profound disillusionment with humanity itself, due to the War in Vietnam and the Cold War. A very impressive film – more than a simple biographical documentary, this essay-film has the power to captivate both the general public and cinephile niches alike.

Wednesday, 12th of October

This morning, it’s time to deliberate – over Zoom – with Mrs. Celebi, my colleague on the jury. We hit it off right from the start: after I open the meeting, I see that she liked exactly the same films as I did (with very slight differences of opinion on the two films), so what follows one of the most enjoyable and straightforward deliberation sessions of my “career” as a juror. We give the award Best Director to the only feature in the competition, Eric Esser’s Family Love, which explores his grandfather’s possible collaboration with the Nazi authorities with great courage and narrative flair, confronting both relatives, archives, and unreliable footage. And we decide upon Emilie Beyssac Cywinska’s A Place in This World as our Best Film, which is also a film about the political past of the filmmaker’s grandparents, but this time around, it’s a tender portrait of the two former members of the Polish Solidarity movement. (We give a special mention to a film shot by a student of UNATC Bucharest – Arsenicik’s First Birthday, a testimony of the Ukrainian refugee crisis, as seen at Romania’s northern border in the spring, focusing on the efforts of a very young mother to reach her husband in Italy.) In the end, we write motivational texts by e-mail correspondence. The rest of the afternoon is devoted to walking with Andreea et comp: trips to thrift stores and cafés.

In the evening, I caught go to one of the most intensely anticipated films of the edition, the centerpiece of the Nick Broomfield retrospective – Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love (2019). The room is packed to capacity, with the kind of audience I always find to be the most beautiful: most are either in their twenties or sixties, and there are so many of them that some are sitting down on the aisles. “How beautiful,” I think to myself, since I haven’t seen anything like this in a very long time – years before the pandemic, even. As for the film itself – it’s relatively conventional in its choices, a combination of photo/videographic archives and talking heads that bring testimonies of Leonard Cohen’s early musical career and of his relationship with his early muse, Marianne Ihlen, whom Cohen met in the sixties, in the small artistic commune of ex-pats that had formed on the Greek island of Hydra. What’s unique – beyond the perennial fascination of looking inside the life of a modern genius – is that Broomfield himself was one of Marianne’s partners at one point: thus giving the love story an atmosphere that feels both broader and more intimate, along with a glimpse into the more uncomfortable corners of the artists’ lives, which are usually glossed over by most such films.

The day ends at Kulinarium, at a dinner with all the festival’s jurors and its artistic director, Kato Csilla – from whom I learn an important detail: for Astra veterans, the audience on the opening night was still far superior to its audiences from the nineties, who reacted quite virulently to films about the Roma community (and not just the audience, but also even documentary filmmakers sometimes); historical perspectives are so strange, sometimes: progress exists, but – as they say – there is still a long way to go.

Thursday, 13th of October

A calm and rainy day: the first screening I go to is at 5 P.M. at Thalia, with The Eagles of Țaga (dir. Iulian Manuel Ghervas & Adina Popescu), about the eponymous football team based in a small Transsylvanian village. At the heart of the film we have the elderly Nelu, the team’s manager – which ranks second-last in the Romanian 5th League – who struggles to keep it alive by hiring players of all ages, many of whom skip matches and training sessions (for various reasons: from work to hangovers), often resulting in really bad scores. The film is a juicy comedy, underpinned by a nice little visual metaphor: crooked lines, ubiquitous in Nelu’s life – from the ones he draws to mark the football field with an old chalk machine to the ones on his small plantation, a parallel (sic!) to his team’s wobbly record. The finale, however, consists of a very surprising happy ending – made all the sweeter by the fact that Mr. Nelu’s wife, who is also a leading character in the film, declared her love for him during the Q&A, after the screening. I died, right then and there.

Then in the evening, at Cine Gold, No Elephant in the Room – a film commissioned by Polish state television and directed by Clara Kleininger, which captures the months in which the Romanian state circus is adapting to a new law, one that banned the use of live wild animals in performances. The main characters are two of the acrobats who used to work directly with the Globus Circus’ small zoo of exotic animals – tigers, lions, and camels. Mioara signs up to audition for the circus’ first show after the ban, directed by a handful of experienced acrobats from the prestigious Cirque du Soleil, while Adrian is in charge of transferring the animals to state zoos. An interesting story, but with a slightly superfluous approach: first of all, it ignores the fact that the ban was prompted by a January 2017 fire that took place at the very same circus, killing 11 animals, and so the relationship between the two protagonists and the animals, while visibly a very good one, is distorted by this omission. Second of all, we don’t really understand the functioning of the institution of the circus, itself, beyond the observation of the characters and a few scenes where we witness clashes between the new, reformist artistic directors and the troupe that is still shaken up by these fundamental changes. One element is, however, excellent: the film’s use of archival footage – ranging from glamorous, propagandistic productions of the Sahia studio reportage to VHS footage of performances from the nineties and aughts, almost dreamlike in content (see the scene where Mioara, dressed as a princess, appears in the ring while riding on the back of a white unicorn).

Friday, 14th of October

My last day in Sibiu – so I take a few final laps around the city with Andreea, around second-hand shops and cafes, before the first of my last two final films (that were painful to pick: weekends at festivals, with multiple simultaneous screenings that sound great, are dreadful): Without, by Serbian filmmaker Luka Papic. A very strange hybrid film about a painter from Belgrade who loses his dog (the fictional part) and then goes on to meet various other people who have lost their dogs along the way (the documentary part) – all of this, underpinned by his various, extremely strange thoughts about life, alongside his also-extremely-strange paintings of Orthodox churches, soldiers and naked women. Beyond noticing that it’s a mood piece, I must confess: one, I don’t really understand what this film is trying to achieve, and two, the director said one of the stupidest, most cynical things I’ve heard recently at the Q&A, namely that “[breeding and domesticating] the canine species was a huge mistake of humanity”. I swear under my breath and immediately leave the room, picking up Andreea along the way to the Thalia Hall, to catch the last film that I have in plan for this edition: Botond Püsök’s Too Close.

Too Close was also one of the most anticipated films of this edition, having also premiered in Sarajevo, like The Chalice. The main reason behind this anticipation is its subject matter: the struggle of a single mother – Andrea, an actress at the Hungarian State Theatre in Cluj – to protect her children from her ex-partner, who sexually abused her daughter from another marriage, and who has just been granted an early release from prison. His return to the community (a small, Hungarian-majority village in Cluj County) reopens all of their old wounds: it’s not just the latent trauma, but also a renewed sense of insecurity due to his presence and his desire to obtain visitation rights, along with the overall mentality of the villagers, who accuse Andrea of having fabricated the entire story. Püsök approaches the topic on two fronts: on the one hand, using his full access to the family home to create a complex portrait of the family, depicting moments both difficult and light-hearted; on the other, by frontally criticizing of Romania’s deep-rooted misogyny and the state’s near-total failure to protect victims of sexual abuse. If the film is quite strong on the first front, the second one is quite faulty: in its search for a wider audience, the film resorts to various mainstream gimmicks (cheesy extra-diegetic music, a supercut at the end that just screams “life goes on”, etc.), along with an off-screen montage of villagers’ retrograde opinions, edited to generic footage of the village, sometimes with an echoing sound effect. This basically amounts to aestheticizing these medieval attitudes – and like any such device in a film on a topic that is so stringent and important, it ends up casting a shadow over the whole endeavor.

That’s about it for this year’s edition of Astra Film – a truly exciting and well-curated one, with films that touched upon a plethora of pressing social themes: certainly a peak in recent years. The films can be watched online for the next two weeks on the festival’s website.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.