This year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam (January 25 – February 4) has featured several Romanian titles, which we are bound to hear more about, no doubt.

Maia – Portrait with Hands (dir. Alexandra Gulea)

Screened in the experimental section ‘Harbour’, Maia – Portrait with Hands by Alexandra Gulea is an important film. This is due to its many virtues, as well as through the lens of a few limitations that allow us to formulate several thoughts about the current state of Romanian documentary (and not only). In fact, it wouldn’t hurt to see in this directorial effort a culmination, an advanced point of a certain international tradition – that of the essay film –, but also to ask ourselves where/how far it can go from here. For all this openness of the essay – the centrifugal nature, the fragment as foundation, the conversation not carried through to the end – which the filmmaker abundantly uses, risks nesting, even within itself, the beginnings of stagnation or, if you will, conditioning.

Conditioning is, of course, the opposite of natural. And there is no doubt that the film essay’s fundamentally incomplete, yet playful, and clever approach comes to resemble more and more something crafted, something strategic, an option that concerns not the film itself but its image, the discourse we anticipate it will generate. It’s a trend today, working in the essay style. In other words, rejecting completeness. The shortlist sheets of documentary festivals abound in patchworks, hybrid films, more or less successful experiments. It’s more practical: a film that refuses today to go “all the way” – that willingly stops before (before what? Revelation, the end, the truth) – is respected. And rightly so: after years and years of absolute films, it was time to shake up this lack of ambiguity a bit. The trouble is when this refusal becomes the opportunistic camouflage of convenience. Since nothing is complete, nothing can be criticized. In the name of which regressive ideal should one criticize? Everything is, as they say, a work in progress.

The main problem here is that Maia – Portrait with Hands comes after other films like it. And I say this because the way the director utilizes the potential of the essay is perfectly suited to what she has to say: I can hardly imagine her film any other way. It needs indecision and indeterminacy, open conclusions, and dispersion. It fights on too many fronts to be able to bring everything together in a plausible, satisfying way. The “essay” is that discreet glue – far more discreet than the classic narrative – that allows the distinct elements of the film freedom to play, leeway, an increased elasticity – just as much as it holds them together in extremis. The essay is what makes these separate, even contradictory, threads ultimately a film.

Going back to the fronts the film touches upon, they range from cultural heritage to the struggle for ethnic emancipation, and from identity to becoming. I should be more specific. I should detail them as in any self-respecting review: “The film talks about…” I won’t. Because untangling these threads would mean to spoil the film. Its beauty lies precisely in its making, interweaving, the resulting aesthetic object, the way one image plus another image never yields the same result. Everything is movement, interference. The montage establishes a network, a web of themes, of motifs begun with hesitation, developed maniacally, abandoned, resumed, forgotten. Never completed. At one end, there is a woman: Alexandra Gulea – the grandmother, filmed on video in the late ’90s, when she had accumulated a lot of bitterness, even more longing, and very little time left. At the other end is emptiness: the film is not brought to a close. Or, barely, now and then, there is another woman: young Alexandra Gulea, a contemporary double bearing her name, who is now making a film about her, mixing everything.

At one point, Alexandra Gulea films her father. Not to show us “who he is”, but to remind herself. Stere Gulea looks firmly and lucidly back at his past, his mother Alexandra, and the corner of Greece they all come from. Above all – unlike his mother and daughter, who flank his destiny through a strange rhyme –, he speaks Romanian. The voice-over delimits itself, professionally, from this imposing figure: she says that at first, she avoided a career in cinema, then she ended up making films anyway, but went for a different approach – not that of dramatization, so dear to her father, but for a minority one, content with its periphery existence, that of the essay. There are no stories in her films, no unity or linear course of events. There are at most beginnings of sentences, pieces of thought, clashes of approaches. As she herself mentions, the film starts from such a micro-unit (a glimpse of life) and tries to reveal something of the overall picture – never the other way around.

The voice is reminiscent of creating a tapestry, a carpet. The metaphor couldn’t be more fitting. The images emerge one by one, woven from nothing before they become visible. That quilting point anchoring the fabric – a Lacanian point de capiton capable of imparting coherence to meaning – is, in this case, Grandma Alexandra: everything starts from her “poor” images, taken from a family video, while the film was nothing more than an obscure intuition. From there, from that origin, is the way paved for the images captured later on digital and film, as well as other techniques (reenactment, animation, political happening, interview, observational) – by which a documentary filmmaker today can claim not so much to penetrate the material but to circumnavigate it anthropologically. Who is Alexandra? We don’t know. But by resorting to history, memories, geography, tradition, we can shed light on some aspects of what she was at a certain point in time. Between the limits of our knowledge and the truth, the film intervenes with its partial method, reluctant to accept any absolute.

I mentioned at the beginning that the film is important. It is perhaps the first one to take an assertive, polemical, compensatory – and not anecdotal or folkloric – look at the journey of an entire ethnic group: the Aromanians. The real beginning in Maia – Portrait with Hands takes place during the Balkan Wars over a century ago. Alexandra Gulea sets out in search of that rebellious tassel in the carpet – then follows the thread to the opposite end, passing through the years of communist repression, where something, however, manages to survive. In fact, there are few Romanian films in which the issue of survival is articulated so acutely – both on a personal-biographical level (see Grandma Alexandra’s father, killed in Greece during the emancipation struggles) and on a cultural-ethnic level. There is a scene showing Stere Gulea, who had returned to his native Dobrogea, at a village feast with people from the community. They talk “as equals” and at one point, start singing an almost elegiac Aromanian song, which Gulea is very much unfamiliar with. One must see the wonder in this citizen of the world’s eyes, who has lost touch with his roots – and has thus been absent from the process of passing on, of perpetuating the ethnic spirit.

There is a remarkable dialogue between Stere and Alexandra, which gives the film extra interest. For what separates them is not only the artistic approach – it’s also, more prosaically and more fundamentally, the issue of generation. In the community tableau painted by the filmmaker, her father is more of a separate figure: we feel in him the desire – under the impulse of youth and, perhaps, the communist regime – to break away from the original environment. A respected director who succeeded in Bucharest, among Romanians, telling “our” dramas (nothing more intrinsically Romanian than the novel Moromeții), Stere Gulea saw the idea of emancipation as an escape, as a better integration into the “accentless” environment of the capital. From the daughter’s point of view, things are different. Perhaps because the father’s struggle is no longer relevant – it is already won. Now is the time to return, to revalue a cultural heritage that otherwise risks being lost. It was believed that progress meant a more or less forced assimilation of data from the center. Today, however, what matters more is differentiation, the clear affirmation of where you come from – geographically, but above all in terms of identity.

Maia – Portrait with Hands is a fresh film, propelled by Alexandra Gulea’s claim to speak for herself about everything that is hers. Strictly related to the Romanian space, it has every reason to intrigue but also to repair: more precisely, to build from scratch a plural image to replace this missing image of Aromanian culture. In a wider context, however, the film is somewhat haunted by the specter of déjà-vu. This idea of a cinema made from the remnants of others should be shaken up a bit. Of course, there is something positive – something ecological – about turning remnants into autonomous matter. But I believe the essay film risks complacency in the role of recycling forms, formats, and ideas: a bit of Straub-Huillet (the landscape that “speaks”), a bit of Pedro Costa (the protagonists filmed with an aura around their heads), a bit of Godard (the collage, the intertitles), etc. I think we’re approaching the threshold where this remix needs to open up to a more significant element of aesthetic novelty.

Sleepy Heads (dir. Tudor Cristian Jurgiu)

In Tudor Cristian Jurgiu’s new short film, Sleepy Heads, two teenagers dawdle around their neighborhood in Bucharest. One of them (Costinel Antone) is on a video call with his mother, who is working abroad in Italy. The other (Mihai Marcu) looks at him. When the first looks back, the latter blushes. It’s a very simple game at play, but one that requires great skill, which Jurgiu certainly possesses, especially in the opening scene of this impromptu photoshoot session, when we sense that there might be more than just friendship between the two. In fact, the film is nowhere better than in its first minutes when everything – from the image of the phone screen to the hypnotic zoom to the window of a man watching them – seems simultaneously necessary and chaotic, a kind of dizziness that hits you while staying still.

The film is carried remarkably by the two lead actors. Mihai Marcu in particular, as the boy who nurtures feelings, is exceptional – a mixture of shyness and sensual temperament devoid of words, entirely contained in discreet glances and facial expressions. In its second half, the film is a bit more hesitant: it simply does not seem to find its form; in other words, the form imposes itself unequivocally in the face of undecided content. Sleepy Heads veers for a moment into a visual coolness, a feeling that these frames emerged by drawing inspiration from similar ones, not out of necessity but out of a slightly strategic search for all that seems clever in contemporary cinema.

On the other hand, towards the end, the film gets back on track. The boy calls his mother again (by now, it’s night) and harasses her with persistent questions: he suspects she is spending the night with an Italian, and that bothers him very much. Here, too, the execution is at its best: the lines delivered from the speaker by Mihaela Rădescu sound real and exasperated, as if the film were revealing a great suffering of estrangement, as well as a world of adults who want to be allowed to live. In fact, in all this naive and rather absurd outburst of the boy, one can find Jurgiu’s main philosophy, which is innocence. It’s a gaze that seeks the line of pure escape, the one that is forced to go through violence just to acquire this unparalleled feeling of childhood. We feel here a modest struggle with everything that is well-versed and wise – wasn’t Jurgiu’s previous film a… fairy tale?! – in the name of an irrational ideal of purity. That’s precisely why the film is unbalanced: the middle segment seems to slide into a pragmatism that its protagonists reject outright.

En un lugar no muy lejano (dir. Luis Roberto Vera)

In 1980, Chilean director Luis Roberto Vera was completing his graduation film on a beach in Costinești. A graduate of IATC (i.e. the Institute of Theatre and Film Arts), he put together a mixed Romanian-Spanish-speaking team to translate the absurd experience of exile and Pinochet’s political dictatorship. Caught between Chile and the Socialist Republic of Romania, Vera filmed this claustrophobic exercise outdoors, with Marga Barbu as an eccentric tourist, to denounce the atrocities taking place back home. In fact, En un lugar no muy lejano taps fluidly into a South American tradition that has turned the space of fiction into an allegory for a world too real to be confronted directly. Showcased at IFFR as part of an exhaustive program dedicated to Chilean cinema made in exile with Pinochet’s rise to power, Vera’s film is more than a minor addition – it’s a case study on how regimes of sensitivity migrate depending on their immediate context, testing their porosity upon contact with any kind of foreignness.

The film can be watched for free here: https://arhiva.unatc.ro/filme/intr-un-loc-nu-prea-indepartat/.

Victor Morozov

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