The European Film Festival (FFE) will take place online this year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic – although the festival itself will start on the 17th of June, hosted by the TIFF Unlimited platform, starting with the 8th of June, FFE has published a short film every day, stemming from a series of 21 films made by Romanian filmmakers. The series was coordinated and curated by Andrei Tanasescu and Anca Hrab, through the Romanian Cultural Institute, bringing together both established names such as Radu Jude, Alexandru Solomon, and Paul Negoescu, as well as filmmakers that are at the beginning of their careers, with a simple indication: to make a short film based on their own perceptions and thoughts about this period of (self-)isolation during the pandemic.

I talked to seven of the filmmakers about their short films, discovering along the way a huge variety of cinematic and thematic approaches, which prove that no single experience of this period was the same: in order of publication of the films, Andra Tarara and David Schwartz, Sofia Iulia Nelega, Teona Galgotiu, Laura Pop, Marius Olteanu and Vlad Petri. The project also includes Radu Jude, Alina Manolache, Bogdan Theodor Olteanu, Vlad Popa, Matei Monoranu, Bogdan Muresanu, Matei Branea, Alexandru Solomon, Mona Nicoara and Edin Velez, Paul Negoescu and Ana Draghici, Ruxandra Ghitescu, and Andrei Inizian.

The Land That Never Sleeps, by Andra Tarara and David Schwartz (available from 12.06)

Andra Tarara is a director, known for her short documentary “A Death in My Family”, who is also working in parallel on her feature debut and in the archives of the Romanian Peasant Museum. David Schwarz is a renowned independent theater director.

What I find special about your film is that it doesn’t resemble the usual diaristic, personal register that has emerged in the films that were made during the pandemic. I wanted to ask you if you wanted to avoid this style from the very beginning.

Andra: It is clear to me that the answer is yes, but not only in the context of the films made about the pandemic, but after having made two films in this register – handheld, personal – I no longer was in the mood for. Aside from super personal movies about family, I felt the need for films that are somehow more stable, including stylistically. I think I had this thing in school, where everything was supposed to be very pretty and aesthetic, and so, as soon as I finished UNATC, I said I’d put my foot in the doorway and abandon that kind of style, in order to focus more on people, so I didn’t care much about this aesthetic side. But I’m starting to get tired with that kind of style, too, and as the pandemic came right when I was thinking about what to do next, thinking that the first impulse would be for everyone to make very personal movies, with their smartphones about how they are bored around the house, I didn’t want to do that anymore.

David: And that’s exactly what’s happening with these films – after a month or so, everything was flooded on social media about how everyone gets bored and anxiety-ridden at home. Somehow, all this abundance of middle-class anxiety about having to stay at home – and I’m not saying they’re not real, and also we’ve had them, I don’t want to downplay these feelings – but it was clear that they’re over-represented. So it was clear to us that we weren’t going to do that.

Andra: Plus, we wanted to make a movie with knickknacks! It was just the perfect chance.

How did you share your responsibilities while making the film?

Andra: Initially, I think we took it all at once, but then David was more into writing, and I was working on the cinematography and the montage. I played a lot, did tests, and explored what the film might look like.

David: I think we actually started working on the concept, the subject, and the themes, we worked together to see what we were concerned about. We read and reread things together. We didn’t start with the voice over, but rather the other way around – we sketched the story and started shooting stuff. Andra coordinated this part.

Andra: It was back-and-forth. We started filming, then writing, then taking new ideas from what we were writing and going back to the shoot.

What did your set look like?

Andra: It’s literally a shelf in a piece of furniture that was thought of as a mini-bar, which lights up on the inside when you open the doors, which you can see in the first shot, as it opens up.

David: The set is the whole room, basically. The knick-knacks were strewn all over the place. But we filmed everything inside the shelf.

Andra: The whole living room was a mess!

David, what can you tell us about the story? The credits say that you were inspired by Poe and Brecht (who is already an important inspiration for you in your work in the field of theatre), but also from Boccacio’s Decameron, where stories are being told during a plague. It’s a strong way of telling a contemporary story, putting it in a very classicized form, of a fable or fairy tale.

David: Sure, these classic storytelling structures, the fairy-tale morphology, haven’t changed across time. Many short stories, theatre performances, even many films today also start from these structures. What was more challenging was finding a way to make things stick together, how to find a common language. A way in which the glue that sticks them together is not visible, in which contemporary terms are not used, but rather archaic terms, even if some are regionalisms – but, on the whole, there is a unified perspective in terms of vocabulary. About the references, which we kept on discussing – some of them interested me on a recurring basis, but others have come very specifically against the backdrop of the pandemic. These stories from Poe and Bocaccio bring various lessons. They’re classics, but they still manage to be contemporary, even if that sounds cliché – they’re really relevant, once more. For example, stories of wealthy refugees on the islands were on the news every day – which also appeared in The Decameron and The Red Death Mask.

There are some specific choices related to the dolls – for example, citizens are represented with black dolls. Or Charlot, who represents a homeless man.

David: We tried to represent people as diversely as possible. The text also has this reference to people from other countries who do lower-paid jobs, which is not even a metaphor – it’s a very transparent reference to the current global context, where people in poorer countries make up for a good part of the working class in rich countries. And there are references that are even reflected in the knickknacks we have in our home – the black woman who carries a water vessel on her head, for example. They are so representative of the global system that they have turned into objects, into commodities, these representations. With Charlot, too, I was looking for a reference to someone who stays on the street.

During this period, there were some gaps in the public discourse in which solidarity was talked about – and the discursive paradigm was not the same as in 2008. Although your film ends on a pessimistic note – the sacrifice of vulnerable members of society – do you think the speech in your film can be seen as risky? It comes from a position of revolt, but is it possible that this is a very good time for this kind of speech?

Andra: You can clearly see the limits of the system at this time, but I don’t think anything’s going to change in a serious way. There are some spaces for certain reactions, but they are still small.

David: I don’t necessarily agree – things are already changing, but it remains to be seen which way it will go. The major difference from 2008 is that it was very easy to be told that “you are to blame for spending too much, now you have to pay”. It was a completely wrong speech, with no ethical basis, or one that was grounded in concrete reality – but now no one can say that “you are to blame for staying in the house”, on the contrary – that was the public discourse. There is a change – including in the attitudes of politicians, who have tried to be more empathetic and supportive, or in certain measures that, in normal times, would have been considered completely out of the question. This comes from this exceptional situation, in which the culprit must also be sought in social inequalities, in corporations, in the unabated intrusion into animal habitats, in scientific warnings that have been ignored. It’s a very good context for a critique or a reflection on the capitalist, pro-profit system that thrives on debt – that’s why we have dealt with these topics head-on. We were a little afraid, Andra thought it might be too in-your-face, but given that I’ve done explicit things before, I’ve gotten used to this kind of criticism, although maybe this project is more allegorical than those projects.

Cabin Diary, by Sofia Iulia Nelega (available as of 13.05)

Sofia Iulia Nelega is a graduate of the Faculty of Theatre and Television at Babeş-Bolyai University. She directed the short films “Party Girl” (2014), “Prohibition” (2016), and “News of Love” (2019). She works as a projectionist at the Florin Piersic Cinema in Cluj-Napoca.

Your film is built on two levels, starting from the title – on the one hand, the concept of cabin fever, and on the other, the projectionist booth. How did you manage to shoot inside the Florin Piersic Cinema and how did you use the cinema to build your film?

Even before I was contacted by the festival, I had shot some footage in the movie theater during breaks, when I wasn’t working. I didn’t have a plan with them, and every once in a while, I’d edit them, put them on music, but I didn’t necessarily have an idea regarding what I would do with them. When they contacted me from the festival, they even told me that they knew I was working at the cinema and that it would be great to integrate it, so I said cool, and I already had some footage, too. Then I first asked for approval from my boss so that I could shoot inside – I already went to the cinema twice a week to do the maintenance of the equipment – and at that time I kept putting music in the room and all sorts of things, taking advantage of the fact that I had the empty room and had to use the equipment, I was having fun with it.

I shot quite a lot – over a period of four weeks, every time I went to the cinema. It was a pretty difficult transition, at least at first, because I didn’t want to reproduce what I used to do because it didn’t seem authentic to me. I felt weird – for example, if I were to film the things I usually do, how I project movies, and so on. Somehow, little by little, I created an alternative reality of space. It was pretty organic. After the first week I started editing the takes and saw that one of the shots had the poster of the movie Arrival, with the tagline Why are they here?, and that’s when I started using the voice-over, to turn the screening booth into a spaceship cabin. About the cabin fever – I was quite privileged, honestly, because I had been working in the cinema for a year and a half now, and I had gotten used to being alone for long periods of time, so it wasn’t such a difficult transition from what I was doing before the quarantine. Of course, the fact that I couldn’t go out at all wasn’t pleasant, but being forced to spend time alone with myself (because I live alone) wasn’t as hard as it would have been if I hadn’t been working at the cinema.

I liked the way you juxtaposed this image of the empty cinema with that of a giant personal screen. The scene in the middle of the film, with the reading of tarot cards – is the reading addressed to you, or is it taken from the web?

No, it’s mine! She’s actually a friend of mine I was in a conversation with on Zoom, I used to do this quite often during quarantine. I was looking for things and I was looking for the path – and the very big irony here is that at some point she tells me that I have to choose the way – somehow, the reading told me that I would always get to the same place, but that I had to choose my way. I didn’t feel that until I had to finish the movie a few hours before the deadline, and I realized I had two endings and I didn’t know what to choose! I find it very interesting. I can’t even honestly tell the difference between when I shot, edited and finished the film, I can’t distance myself at this moment – but I can actually say it made my life richer. For example, when I used the room to project my image or that of my friend, it’s a very particular experience, I was thinking about the Wizard of Oz. (laughs)

You have a series of scenes where you counterbalance a kind of imaginary (visual and auditory) that is related to the individual consumption of images – in front of your laptop or other small screens – and you put them in tension with the big screen, which implies a common experience, other sensory experiences besides visual and auditory ones. These types of experience go back to the first conceptions of the cinematic experience (the Lumiere brothers’ cinema versus Edison’s kinetoscope). How did you work with this tension between the individual and the common cinematic image experience?

Somehow, I think you can see that they end up confusing and replacing each other in the film. What has affected me a lot this time, which I think has also been translated into the film, is that a lot of things, ideas – end up not being part of a clear hierarchy, or well-structured. It’s like they’re all going into the same space and they’re at an equal distance from you and they’re floating around. That’s how I felt, at least that’s how things happened in my mind: it was a super chaotic democracy of ideas and perception. I think and that’s it, in the film, I’ve gone very irresponsibly (or, I don’t know) from one experience to another. From an inner world to an outer world, to outer space… I think in the end, that’s how I felt. Seeing the cinema empty – a space that now has a function that is frozen in time – was a very unusual experience.

There are two other visual levels in the film, apart from the ones that relate to how images are consumed – there is a dreamy-like level, in which we see, for example, someone who has a very deep and hard dream, and then there is an area of “second-hand” images, if I may call them that, especially in the last shot of the film. How did you work with this juxtaposition of dreams, an image that somehow comes from a very organic place, that processes your prior day, and on the other hand, this bombardment with advertising images, or coming from other images?

Yes, it’s kind of like some kind of two-dimensional fantasy. I felt like that’s where it was going, somehow – that there was a point where the fantasy could reach. It’s also beautiful, in a way, but, as I said, two-dimensional. Maybe, for example, when I was little and dreaming, I dreamed I was in Jumanji, for example. I think the film is also about that – a kind of shock, a clash between reality and fantasy. The fact that I processed my daily life helped me not necessarily in order to analyze it, to be honest, because I was already in quite of an introspective process, but, perhaps, to adjust more, to be more curious. It gave me joy. I know it sounds like an antithesis between these types of images, but it seems to me that, at some point, they can meet, or come from the same place, have the same effect. It’s a little weird.

A first signal in the film that you’re about to discuss projections and reflections is the shot in which you appear yourself, in front of the screen – in the kind of image you see reflected back at yourself on Zoom or Skype – and then there’s a moment when it’s revealed that, in fact, your image is in turn projected outwards. How did you build that scene, especially in combination with that digital voice over, which gives a strong sense of uncanny, of digitization of the self?

Yes, it’s somehow a surrogate or an inner surrogate voice. The first time I related to the form and the method. I knew I wanted to project something about myself on the screen and see what that actually means. I wanted to stand up to it, I wanted to see how it went. Because anyway, after a while, because I could use it for all kinds of things, the movie theater had really become a sort of mental space. I would also enter the theater and it would become a ritual experience – there was absolutely no one there, and I had all sorts of moments in the room, especially because I didn’t leave the house otherwise. It was a space where I could experiment. A lot of things in the film were built almost unconsciously – maybe if it was someone I knew, but that wasn’t me, maybe it would have been different. But it was like I needed to do that, find my position in regards to certain things. So that was the reason why I worked with so many levels.

Elephant Faraway, by Teona Galgotiu (available from 14.05)

Teona Galgotiu is a director, poet, and organizer of the Super film festival. She has directed, so far, “Short conversation about the D word” (2018) and “My Mother is Just One” (2019).

In your film, you create a narrator that is very interesting – it’s a dehumanized spirit that comes and possesses your body and your subjectivity, analyzing it coldly, while having few affective inputs. How did you build this post-humanist side of your film, this voice?

At the beginning of everything, before Andrei wrote to me about this project, I was thinking about making a movie – and I also filmed a few days for it – where I was doing all kinds of stuff around the house, and I was trying to capture all this inertia and depression, all the things I felt. It was me, sitting on the floor, me walking around the house, there were also a few shots from around the house (including the shots with the light, which I used in the film). But then I felt like there’s some kind of shady narcissism going on in this time when you’re stuck in the house, and you’re so focused on your daily routine and how bad you feel, it was starting to seem very unfair to me to concentrate on that. That’s why I came up with this idea with this character who’s not human, who is but isn’t who I am.

I thought it worked much better for me – I felt it would be some kind of intellectual and narcissistic masturbation to have it be about me, me, me. And seeing more films made out of quarantine – and I don’t mean the ones in this project – it seemed to me that filmmakers are getting very absorbed in their own image, too much “me”.

So it was also a mechanism to divorce your own experience, to analyze it coldly. It seems to me that this is also reflected in the found footage part of your film – this viral video bombardment that has been going on lately. How did you build this part? It’s a crescendo, culminating in those disturbing images from Bolintin-Vale.

The point is, I’ve been collecting for quite some time now all the videos that I could find, and the selection… There were these funnier parts, like the video of the puppy or the child stealing the car, and I thought it was important to have a balance between the different feelings and sensations I had while watching these videos. I thought it was far-fetched and to say that everything that was going on in the world was very dark and suffocating, because there were some things that were funny. But these funny parts too – it seems to me that if you look at them long enough, they become very alien. That’s why I think I’ve resorted to the idea of this character being an alien. Okay, it’s funny to see a dog being walked by a drone, but it’s really just – it makes no sense.

Going back to the extraterrestrial self – it seemed to me like a genre film element, of the alien who observes how some forms of foreign life work, testing how your body works, observing the world. It’s alienated and alienating at the same time. The alien who sees the world through you – what are her conclusions, beyond those in the film, of her sober report in the film, is she seeing something beyond that?

As I wrote these notes that she makes, I thought that in addition to all the weirdness she feels and all these things that she describes in the cold, she’s actually discovering an emotion that’s very human, that she doesn’t know how to manage at first. Even if at the end she says she doesn’t want to be human, it seems to me that she still develops a very high level of curiosity about what it means to become attached to some images of some leaves, to the light that falls in a certain way on the wall. That’s why I chose these things which, at first, may be very banal images that you are used to, but from the perspective of someone who has never seen them before, they can very easily be connected by an emotion that has a complete human specificity.

If I were to imagine her next report, I think she would discover more and more sensations that would make her want to stay longer and longer.

This post-humanistic way of making film – which moves away from the need for human contact, or human input – is becoming more and more prevalent, and the pandemic seems to me to have accelerated certain trends of this kind, especially in the area of experimental cinema. How do you situate yourself in regards to these trends, to this kind of registry?

It seems to me that, surprisingly, my tendency to explore post-humanity… it seems to me that the things we are referring to now, with the term post-human, are actually the humanity of the present, the way we behave now. To me it comes from an excess of emotion, from the feeling that I am overwhelmed by all the terrible and strange things that are happening around us, about which I can not usually do anything but share something on Instagram or Facebook. It seems to me that it’s this need to be more objective and take a step back because you don’t know what to do with all this torrent of emotion and the need to do something actively, while being actually very powerless.

This alien was for me like a bridge between me and all this stuff that I don’t know what to do with, and okay, I was thinking, oh now how sad it is that I have to stay in the house and I’m not be able to go for a walk or see my friends anymore, but at the same time, that’s so little compared to what’s going on right now.

Atria, ventricles, by Laura Pop (available from 14.05)

Laura Pop is an animation film director, known for her multiple-award-winning short film “The Monster” (2018).

I really liked the parallel you create between the four chambers of the heart and the idea of isolation in the apartment. Where did this metaphor come from?

I knew I had very little time to make the film, which meant I had to do something relatively easy to draw, but with a strong idea behind it. So I took a longer period of time to think about what I want to do and less about the animation itself. I had the idea from the beginning with a character who tosses and turns (because that’s how I felt during this whole time), then I came up with the rooms, and the one with the heart, right at the end, when I was thinking about the title. Looking at the composition, I suddenly had a revelation with the four rooms of the heart, and it all made sense then.

In your films, objects are in a perpetual transformation – they grow or shrink, change their properties, they transform; which is all the more visible here. How does your creative process work, how do you create these associations? To what extent is it defined by the freedoms that the animation offers?

I guess because I’m very self-conscious, I surprise myself in all kinds of postures (sometimes I feel young, sometimes old, sometimes a child, sometimes the mother of that child, sometimes small, sometimes unwieldy). I think in Atria, Ventricles, I thought it was important to create something (I don’t know what; maybe hope?), and the water (which I had originally thought of as a string of tears) drove everything – it became the medium of the fish and then the one that helps grow the tree in the soul…

I like to use the animation extensively; why bother with and stick to realistic representations when I can show exactly how I feel when my body is slowly draining or when I’m being pulled like in a whirlpool of water?

How do you compose the sound design of your films?

Each film was an interesting experience, each with a different artist. I usually like to give enough freedom to the designers I work with (although sometimes it’s problematic), and that’s because I’m not that good at sounds/music. For The Monster, I started from a mini-sketch made by me, over which Grig Burloiu did a superb job with the sounds generated. With Miroir, I discovered my fascination with the sound worlds composed with a single instrument (used in all senses – singing with it, hitting it, etc.); so I ended up collaborating with Gauthier Simon on the double bass, plus some electronic accents in some of the places. For Atria, Ventricles, I worked with Ann Kuznetsova in an extremely short time. She had told me that she had the energy to allocate for a project that relates to the pandemic, and the only indication I gave her at the beginning was that maybe it would be interesting to have a different sound for each room. Then she came up with the idea of tying us to fire, air, water, earth, and that came out; I think she gave the film an extra layer.

Unthinking. Unfeeling, by Marius Olteanu (available from 15.06)

Marius Olteanu is a film director, best known for his multi-award-winning debut, “Monsters.” (2019) and the short films “Blank Score” (2015) and “No Man’s Land” (2017).

I’d start by asking you about the voice over in the film – lately, you’ve been publishing several diaristic texts. How did you come to choose to apply this formula in the film? It is clear that you have a preoccupation with this style.

I think it seemed to me that it lends itself best to what I wanted to say, because I realized that after the first two weeks of quarantine when I kept calling friends of mine and talking to them, I realized that it is actually an experience that is very depressing, but also one that makes me very alone. It seemed to me, at first, that since I was no longer getting to see people, to meet anyone, that I could no longer connect with them, and secondly, I kept having stories in my mind, I kept thinking about things. That’s why I was glad (at first, but then I realized it was harder than I expected) when Andrei Tanasescu called me and told me about this project because I thought, okay, even if I wrote these things, one of them I could really turn into something.

And, yes, I think – still, it seems to me that it was the only option. I also thought about the option of not saying those things, but some of them I could only pass on like that. I find it very hard and, although there’s a lot of talk about how important it is that a film is made by a team, not by a single person, you realize it much more powerfully when you don’t have any other choice, you know? When the prop is your own house, the only actor is yourself, you have to film, you have to put the lights… Well, it’s pretty alienating, so to say, as an experience. I said I’d go all the way with this circumstance, and I said that, besides being a very intimate movie, somehow it’s natural for it to take the aspect of a journal, to be a kind of video diary at the formal level.

One of the main themes – implicitly, at least for me, was this struggle of the isolated self, which tries to virtually reproduce certain experiences that can only be lived on the outside. I find it all the more powerful, then, that you built a Volkswagen Camper from LEGO pieces, which is the symbol of freedom, of lack of boundaries or borders. And the video at the end also seems to me like an attempt to replicate some kind of event that is no longer possible in the circumstances. Was this theme part of the conscious approach?

Yes, there were two things here – on the one hand, there was this need to escape, and I realized that I could do this by watching movies and discovering other people’s experiences, or imagining things or, what was most available to me, by remembering things. That was one aspect – that’s why the elements appear concerning Iceland, my family, and the first images that appear on the projector are from a film I made in 2001, from the raw footage.

Somehow, all these things have been linked to the level at which I felt reduced by this quarantine, namely, a level that has a certain naivety, specifically, I felt infantilized by this experience. I thought I was reduced to a sort of helplessness that seems specific, for me, to children. Somehow I wanted to end up reproducing a childhood experience and seeing how I would live it now. I had the great surprise to find, as I say in the film, that what used to be a great joy was now coming with a very great sense of fear attached to it, that what should actually come out is not going to, and this fear is very closely related to what’s going on on outside – with the quarantine, this disease, the virus, with what is happening to us. And then, somehow, it connected organically to the need to go back to an area where I felt much safer. It was… I don’t know how the film is going to be perceived by people who don’t know me, who may not have had these experiences, but for me, the construction of this van was almost a therapeutic experience.

I thought about a lot of things – and that’s what I think everyone noticed during quarantine, that all the details, that everything was much more acute, that it generated more thoughts and more connections than usual – it seemed to me that the moment I was building the van, beyond the fear that it wouldn’t come out the right thing, I was making a lot of connections, with memories, with things that I felt about what was happening from the outside. Although I had originally thought that the film would be about this construction process, I decided against filming it – that maybe I was ruining my joy of building it.

The Deer Passed in Front of Me, by Vlad Petri (available from 18.05)

Vlad Petri is a documentary film director and trainer, best known for the films “Where Are You, Bucharest?” (2013) and “Walking Across the Seaside” (2015). This film is dedicated to the memory of his grandmother.

In this film, you turn to a special stylistic and thematic approach that doesn’t resemble the movies you’ve made so far. Could you tell us how this experience was, to construct a film into a new artistic registry, especially considering the emotional weight of the subject?

I’m going to start a little bit with the genesis of the film – which started on May 8th, when my grandmother died. My father called me, told me what had happened and I went to Bistrita. Being in a state of emergency, I witnessed a strange funeral, with few people wearing masks. We also filmed the funeral, because Grandma’s sister lives in another country, and we wanted to send her the recording of the funeral so she could see it, and then I spent two days in Bistrita, with my parents, and I started taking the family photo albums and looking through them. By turning the pages, a story began to build up – and I remembered that I had some old recordings of my grandmother, from 2010, when I started filming more things with my family. Initially, I had in mind a film about my father – and that’s when I filmed my grandmother, who has the gift of telling stories, she loved to hang out with her grandson. That’s pretty much how the movie started.

Looking through the albums, I discovered the family’s personal archive, where I found some fascinating photos. Among them is a photograph taken over 100 years ago, from 1915, which also has a special texture, like an oil painting. I was taken over by various moods as I looked through the album and reconstructed these stories. Initially, I wanted to make a film out of these photos and build the background sound from various ambient sounds, but, discovering grandma’s voice, I thought I’d make a part of the story of her life, which ends in the film at a certain point. The story continues, but this point is essential now, in this form. It’s different than what I’ve done before, but I like to reinvent myself. I don’t like mannerisms. I’m working on two very different documentary film projects now – one is built only from official film archives and the other is observational. Working during this period – and thank God with Andrei Tanasescu, who pulled us and put us on some deadlines, it’s good to have them – I was very enthusiastic, it’s one of my most soulful projects. I think I want to continue this film in a feature film, in which Grandma’s voice is followed by the voice of other family members, to reach the present, in the digital age.

Grandparents sometimes have this sort of insistence in their stories, where they keep mentioning people who have died and they emphasize this fact. Was it a conscious choice to use several fragments in which your grandmother mentions all kinds of people who were part of her life, but who were no longer at the time?

The concept of loss underpins everything I do, and even from a loss, I’ve developed the impulse to make film, even though in the meantime I’ve gone to other areas. I think through this project I discovered this initial drive – the loss of that person, who through their last images, was becoming present again. I think it’s a very important thing – especially here, because photography is a static image, it has less life (apparently) than a moving image, but it manages to catch some worlds, to immortalize them, to keep something before the final loss. It’s something I’m passionate about, as seen in the monument that appears in the film, dedicated to my great-grandfather’s brothers. Film and photography can also be a monument to one person, even if it is not necessarily the primary intention.

I think there are two plans – the level of the photo and the level of sound. The fact that we hear Grandma as she speaks gives her presence. The counterpoint – the fact that you know from the very beginning that she has died, is counterbalanced by the fact that her voice remains present throughout the entire film. I’m very passionate about loss, and maybe that’s why I left it in the movie: “he’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead”. It’s also her style of speaking, always mentioning it, always referring to the world that had disappeared, to the few people that remained of it. That last picture of his grandfather – and she keeps saying that – a strange picture, of grandpa, turned to the side, with that bride who is looking straight into the lens, her husband with his back to the camera… When someone dies, I think you’re trying to hold on to this, in an attempt to give life to that person once again. It’s also a way of working with a certain trauma that you have when you see these images, of coming to terms with things you don’t understand. For Grandma it was a shock, for the whole family – grandpa was young, his accident happened suddenly.

Like you said before you started the interview, a whole world gets lost when an older person is no longer. Your film comes at a time when we know that people like your grandmother were the most vulnerable. How did you merge the oral document, the living archive – the discussion with your grandmother – and the plastic archive? How can we relate to these (living) archives at such a particular time as this?

For me it was a rediscovery of my family’s past. Okay, I’d sat with my grandma and listened to the stories and I’d been looking through the albums, but now it’s been a whole other kind of discovery. I started putting things together and finding out all sorts of things from the past – I even thought about the people who took care of these photos. Most of them are made by Grandpa, but there are other photographers, other periods too.

For example, those photos of the people that had courted them.

Yes! I call it the Facebook moment – it’s like a Facebook page, that one part of the album. I thought it was really something – and how they’re all set up and, as Grandma says, “he’s dead, and he’s dead too…”. But so, in a sort of way of not having secrets…. It’s really a moment!

But to go back to that 1916 photograph, where my great-great-grandfather was at war, he was a prisoner held in Trieste, and the family went a whole day to get to Targu Mures to take that photo. They prepared themselves, they stood still for a few minutes – that picture has a whole story. The way they stand, the way they’re dressed… I started to see all kinds of things, how these people grew up. My great-grandmother, for example, who’s four years old in that picture, in a few minutes she’s sixty, in the film. It’s a game in which you play with time, somehow, with all these stories. The way they’ve taken care of this image is significant – in the digital age, when we have so many images that we have nothing to do with all of them, we take dozens of photos every day, we stop sorting them and we end up losing a lot of them. At the time, for a photograph you would go to another city, you would keep it, or send it to the frontline, you would take care of these albums – which were unique objects, a unique family story. Through this film, I can preserve them even longer, I can give them a way to increase their longevity, through the medium of film. I am glad that they are gaining a new life in this filmic structure, and with the help of my grandmother, a new narrative. They were disparate, unrelated stories, not necessarily ordered chronologically and with all sorts of red lines running around – but by putting them under this shape, they are given a certain storyline. What I discovered was a therapeutic process and a process of discovering my family, but also of the area in which it lived.

Filmmaker Peter Forgacs argues, in an academic article, that in domestic images the narrator plays a key role, being the one who interprets the images: both the narrator inside the diegesis, but also the narrator present outside the object, who interprets them. It’s something that’s also powerfully apparent from your film – one can observe certain historical and cultural artifacts in the pictures and identify them on this basis without knowing their intimate story, but only the narrator can tell what’s really going on there.

About what you’re saying – I think the first narrators were the ones who captured the images, the second one being Grandma, and the third being me and the team of this film, who put them in this shape. And then there’s the narrator-spectator, who projects his own thoughts into the film, from him or herself and their own private experience. For example, where Grandma might have answered some questions, now it’s impossible because she’s gone. That’s why I think it’s good to ask people as long as they are still alive. Now I want to ask her more things, but I can’t – but I’m glad I have that, and I’m sure Grandma would have been happy to see the film. She started writing her memoirs and even told me, at one point, that maybe I would do something with them. Seeing that on the footage, I thought it was incredible because that’s what’s happening right now.

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.