Romanian Adina Pintilie’s feature film “Touch Me Not” wins Berlin’s Golden Bear
An experimental film about intimacy by the Romanian director Adina Pintilie wins the top Golden Bear prize at the Berlin International Film Festival
Corina Sabău, 24.02.2018, 12:55
Touch Me Not, which follows the story of a woman who can’t bear to be touched and of other people searching for intimacy, has been chosen from a field of nineteen competitors at the Berlinale, the first of the year’s major European movie festivals. The jury of the festival was led by the German director Tom Tykwe.
Shot between 2015 and 2017, Touch Me Not has a mixed cast of professional and non-professional actors from all over Europe, from Romania to Iceland, Germany, Bulgaria, France and the UK. The director of the Berlin Festival, Dieter Kosslick, received the film with enthusiasm and said he was impressed with it.
Adina Pintilie: It was an act of trust from the organisers, but I’m not sure our film is an exception. In any case, we were greeted with open arms and we are grateful for this. We worked a lot on this film, it took us about seven years to make. We began in 2011 and everything went well abroad in terms of funding, but then we couldn’t get any funding in Romania, at least not until our international success became known. So it was a beautiful project, but difficult from many points of view.
A combination of fiction, documentary and visual art and a daring experiment in terms of content and cinematographic language, Touch Me Not is a personal exploration of the idea of intimacy and of the human need for authentic contact. The film is an attempt to discover the different layers of intimacy. Intimacy is full of dangers. The obverse of love can be hate, aggression, and intolerance. These are all sides of the same complex reality, says Adina Pintilie:
Adina Pintilie: I believe the way in which we experience intimacy is influenced by many different factors, such as education, the culture we live in, our background. However, the practical reality of the interaction with others is much more complex. So this is how my film was born, out of curiosity. I realised I didn’t know much about intimacy and human nature, and I began to rediscover some of the sometimes surprising ways of experiencing intimacy. I worked both with professional actors and with non-professionals, people who had never worked in cinema before but who were interested in this area of research. The result is a combination between their personal stories and fictional elements. We experimented with pschycodrama and tried out many things that highlighted precisely the mechanisms we often use in our interaction with the others without realising it. In fact, all characters are faced with this conflict between the need for intimacy and the fear of entering a relationship of interdependence, afraid that they may become too vulnerable.
Touch Me Not is not Adina Pintilie’s first film on the border between fiction, documentary and the visual arts. Her previous productions are viewed by critics as a unique phenomenon on the local cinematographic landscape, standing out for their profoundly personal visual style, bold experimentation with the cinematographic language and an uncompromising exploration of human psychology. We asked Adina Pintilie what is the most important thing for her when she creates a story:
Adina Pintilie: I’m always very open-minded when I begin a new project and the form it takes is often the result of its content. In this case I began with a script that was more of a general sketch for my research. There was an initial story and I chose my cast based on it, but the cast I ended up with was more suitable to a documentary film than a feature film. We tried to get to know the person in front of us, we worked with music that means a lot to these people and we worked with memories and with dreams. Having found the right people, I then began this experimentation in intimacy, using fiction as a structure that allowed us to work with elements from reality. Given that intimacy is a difficult area for many of us, including the participants in the project, the fact that I used a fictional structure created a safe zone around the project. This means that no one in my crew knew what is personal and what is fictional in the material we used in our work with the actors.
Touch Me Not is the first part of a future multi-platform project supported, among others, by the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Spinnerei Art Centre in Leipzig. Exploring, beyond taboos, the essential role that intimacy plays in human development, Touch Me Not aims to open new paths, to educate, to promote tolerance and freedom of expression, to create a space for (self)reflection, making viewers to reassess their own ideas about intimacy, Adina Pintilie also said.
Her most recent medium-length film called Oxygen was part of the official selection of the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2010 and was nominated for the best short-film award and best young talent award of the Romanian film awards in 2011. Journal #2, a Dutch-Romanian coproduction, Adina Pintilie’s latest short-film, won the ZONTA best film award by a female director at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhauseun in 2013, while her previous short film, Balastiera #186, was selected in the auteur short film category at the Locarno Film Festival in 2008.(Translated by C. Mateescu, updated by D. Vijeu)
