Filmmaker Anca Miruna Lazarescu was born in 1979. She
\nsettled in Germany with her family in 1990. Yet her ties with Romania have
\nnever been severed. Proof of that are the first short reels she made after she
\nhad graduated from the Television and Film University in Munich, but also from
\nthe University of California in Los Angeles. The titles of those films are Bucharest-Berlin, made in 2004, The Secret of Deva, a documentary she
\nmade in 2007 and Silent River, a film
\nmade in 2012. The latter production scooped a string of international awards,
\namong which the Gopo Award for best short-reel. The film tells the story of two
\nRomanian friends, who in 1986 intend to flee Romania swimming their escape out
\nof the country through the Danube. <\/p>\n
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While shooting Silent
\nRiver, Anca Miruna Lazarescu started filming her first feature film, which
\nwas launched in 2016 and is entitled That
\nTrip We Took with Dad. The film again takes up on the topic of fleeing
\ncommunist Romania, which is actually a recurring theme throughout the
\nfilmmaker’s childhood, under the form of a family story, told and retold on
\nSunday evenings or on feast days. The story was actually experienced by Anca
\nMiruna Lazarescu’s father at the age of 18, later serving as screenplay for That Trip We Took with Dad. In the hot
\nsummer of 1968 two Romanian youngsters leave the country with their father and
\nfind themselves torn between returning to the country and staying on the other
\nside of the Iron Curtain. The choice is made against the backdrop of the
\ninternational events that year: the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the troops of
\nthe Warsaw Pact and the students’ rallies that had spread all across Western
\nEurope back then. The complexity of that family legend was something the
\nfilmmaker herself foresaw throughout the years as she was growing up. With
\ndetails on that, here is Anca Miruna Lazarescu herself:<\/p>\n
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When I was still in
\nRomania, and I was, like, 9 or 10, I didn’t understand very well what exactly
\nthat story meant. I didn’t fully understand all the political or emotional
\ndimensions. It was only much later, during my directing studies with the Film
\nSchool in Munich, that I began to realise it had been a story with a strong
\nemotional impact. It is the story of my father who was 18 in 1968 and who, just
\nlike in the film, had very little time to take a crucial decision, a decision
\nthat would influence his life forever. He had no choice other than take the
\ndecision under chaotic circumstances: either stay in the West, in a system he
\ndid not know and which he had only dreamed of, or return to the country which
\nwas nothing like the West back then.<\/p>\n
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Since the story was
\nhighly emblematic for her family, Anca Miruna Lazarescu admits she personally
\ngot involved way too much in the making of the film. For instance, a little bit
\nof herself could be found in each of the three main characters in the movie:
\nthe father and his two sons. Although she was not interested in box office
\nsuccess with her previous productions, the situation was different with That Trip We Took with Dad. Anca Miruna
\nLazarescu once again:<\/p>\n
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As compared to the
\nshort-reel Silent River, a production
\nI wanted as pure and ravishing as it could be, so that the film could succeed
\nin festivals, I wanted That Trip We Took with Dad to reach a larger audience.
\nI tried to guide the public so as to make sense of certain historical details.
\nI believe that’s what the biggest change was about: it was for me to try to
\noffer as few data as possible, so as not to bore my audiences and at the same
\ntime provide some information for the younger audiences. I didn’t want to be
\nobjective. For a filmmaker being objective will only distance himself or
\nherself from the topic or the characters. However, what I really wanted was to
\ncreate characters many people can identify with. I think that even a negative
\ncharacter may not have that intention. A film becomes realistic the moment even
\nthe worst characters seem to have human reasons for acting the way they do.<\/p>\n
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Immediately after its release, a
\npromotion tour followed, so that That
\nTrip We Took with Dad can reach audiences in as many Western and Eastern
\nEuropean countries as possible, but also in Russia. The film captures the
\ndifferent ways in which citizens from the Soviet concentration camp and
\ncitizens from the West related to the events of the year 1968 – the former
\nfleeing communism, the latter militating for a communist revolution. It is
\ninteresting to watch the various reactions of modern-day audiences. Speaking
\nabout that, here is Anca Miruna Lazarescu once again:<\/p>\n
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The feedback I had
\nin Prague or Budapest was different from what I noticed in the West. In Munich,
\nquestions went something like, ‘It’s all good, we all know what we’ve been
\nthrough in those times, we took to the streets to rally…But how truthful were
\nyou in the way you presented what happened in Romania? And when the film was
\nscreened in Prague, Budapest or in Romania, the feedback I got went something
\nlike, ‘Thank you, for the first part of the film, we all know what it was like
\nin 1968. But how truthful are the scenes showing youngsters from the West
\ndreaming of a communist revolution? I was very happy as it seemed to me the
\nfilm can bring together and closer citizens who in fact lived in concentration
\ncamps that had for so long been different from one another.<\/p>\n
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To Romanian cinemagoers, That Trip We Took with Dad
\noffered yet another pleasant surprise. The return to the big screen of a very
\npopular actor, Ovidiu Schumacher, who settled in Germany in the late 1980s and
\nwho has since been absent from Romanian cinema and theatre. <\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Interview with Romanian-born film director Anca Miruna Lazarescu about her work and her ties with Romania.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":161464,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44685],"tags":[44844],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-161463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-of-culture","tag-anca-miruna-lazarescu"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n