“Triton”, a multi-award winning documentary
The documentary "Triton", by Ana Lungu, recently released in Romanian cinemas, had its world premiere in France.
Corina Sabău, 22.11.2025, 14:00
The documentary “Triton”, by Ana Lungu, recently released in Romanian cinemas, had its world premiere in the International Competition of the FID Marseille Festival. The film received the Special Jury Prize for the valorization of private materials at the Archivio Aperto Bologna and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Transylvania International Film Festival, and was also nominated in the Semaine de la critique section of Montréal Canada and at the Astra Film Festival. “Triton” is a montage film, based exclusively on archival materials, rare amateur images filmed between WW2 and the 1989 Revolution.
“Triton” is composed of three stories treated differently in terms of style, but linked together by a female narrative voice: a father who films his daughter’s childhood in Romania in the 1980s, a music teacher who documents the lives of family members and friends in the 1960s-1970s, and an aristocrat who captures images from the summer of 1942, when Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany. The collaboration with director Dane Komljen, born in Bosnia-Herzegovina and settled in Berlin, who also edited the film, was essential in the case of this project, says filmmaker Ana Lungu: “The decision to have the film in three stylistically different parts came while I was already working alone. I worked alone for about a year on the editing of the film and since then I felt that it was more appropriate for the three parts to be separate and not forcibly connected through a fiction. I initially asked Dane Komljen to assist me on the voice-over part, because I had never worked with voice-over before, while Dane uses this medium in all his films. I already knew that Dane Komljen also has literary skills, he published poetry before he started making films and this aspect also mattered a lot in my choice. So I was very honored that he accepted this collaboration. Dane came up with this idea, that as long as we have three stylistically different parts, the voice-over should also be different. In the first part I chose to be in the first person, in the second part to be in the third person and in the last part to be in the second person. As I said before, this idea seemed very appropriate to me and I kept it. And in the middle part, in the story with the narrator, there is a small reference to the novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov and other literary references were somehow the basis of my collaboration with Dane.”
Andrei Tănăsescu, festival selector and curator, identified, with “Triton”, a new stage in Ana Lungu’s filmography: “Discovering these archives that she uses in Triton, Ana Lungu has inaugurated a stylistically and formally different cinematic language from the one she has approached so far in her fiction films. It should be noted, however, that the fiction films directed by Ana Lungu so far also used biographical elements of the actors and actresses that we found in the cast. Ana now works with found materials, found objects, meaning personal archives in this case, which already have an autonomy as cinematic or visual objects. And Ana offers them a space for expression, but also reinterprets them, and does this in an ethical way, a very important approach when working with archives. (…) Triton is, obviously, a very well-thought-out creative act and I am referring to the narrative and the tone it has. Triton is a rich film, which deserves repeated viewings, because the audience will find something different, something new every time. Or, why not, and this option is valid, every time the viewer will be confirmed or not a certain message or a certain perception towards the way the film is narrated or towards the archives themselves. I observe with great admiration, and I have said it before, that Romanian films or hybrid documentaries, are increasingly interested in archives. And Triton, in particular, gives us access to some rarely seen personal archives, whether we are talking about cinema or other media channels.”
Ana Lungu was born in 1978 and has so far made, independently, feature fiction films selected in international festivals such as the Locarno Festival (“Whale Belly”, 2010), the Rotterdam Festival (“Self-Portrait of a Good Girl”, 2015), the Sarajevo Festival (“A Prince and a Half”, 2018). It won the Best Film Award at the Crossing Europe Festival, Linz and the Audience Award at the European Film Festival, 2015. She has been a member of the European Film Academy since 2019. The producers of the film “Triton” are Adrian Sitaru and Ana Lungu. (EE)
