During the lockdown introduced across Europe over the
\nCOVID-19 pandemic, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Bucharest invited 60 artists
\nfrom Austria and Romania to reflect on their future in arts and on how their art
\nand communities may see themselves transformed during and after the health
\ncrisis.<\/p>\n
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The videos they submitted were posted by the Austrian Cultural
\nForum Bucharest on social networks. The success of the initiative prompted the
\nACF Bucharest team to entrust the distinguished theatre and film director Carmen
\nLidia Vidu with the production of a documentary using the video materials of
\nthe participating artists. We talked to Andrei Popov, deputy director of the Austrian
\nCultural Forum Bucharest and delegate producer of the documentary #newTogether,
\nabout the birth of this project that he initiated jointly with the ACF
\nBucharest director Thomas Kloiber: <\/p>\n
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Andrei Popov: The project took shape the moment the pandemic was
\nsweeping the world. It was then that myself and Thomas Kloiber, the head of the
\nACF Bucharest, asked ourselves about the usefulness our work still had, about
\nthe role of culture at a time when people have entirely different needs, some
\nof them immediate, if we think back at that period. And because we couldn’t
\nfind a satisfactory answer to this question, which I continued to think about these
\n2 years, we tried to find out the opinions of the main beneficiaries of our
\nwork, that is, the artists themselves. So we asked 30 artists in Austria and 30
\nartists in Romania how they lived the respective period, when as you recall we
\nwere staying at home and had no solutions, nobody knew how to make progress in
\ntheir work or whether progress in that work still meant anything. We asked them
\nhow they saw their own future, meaning both their personal lives and their
\nartistic careers, after the end of the pandemic. This is how this 2-month video
\nexperiment was born. The artists recorded the videos during the lockdown and
\nsent them to us. All these clips were made in that exact period, and they can
\nstill be viewed on the ACF’s Facebook page. At the end of this experiment, one
\nof the participating artists, Mihai Zgondoiu, asked us if we didn’t want to
\nmake a film using this huge collection of several tens of hours of video
\nrecordings. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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This is how the documentary #newTogether came to
\nbe. Chosen to direct it was Carmen Lidia Vidu, an artist awarded by GOPO and
\nUNITER, a strong feminist voice, an opinion leader who approaches social,
\npolitical, cultural and civic themes. #newTogether
\nis a form of dialogue while in isolation, a firsthand testimony. Our frailty,
\nvulnerability, fear became a universal language, which we all spoke in 2020, during
\nthe Covid-19 pandemic, Carmen Lidia Vidu said about the project. <\/p>\n
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Gabriel Bebe\u0219elea, Tudor Giurgiu, Ada Hausvater, Radu
\nIacoban, Dan Lungu, Dan Perjovschi, Istvan Teglas, Alexandru Weinberger, Elena
\nVl\u0103d\u0103reanu, Gottlieb Wallisch, Elise Wilk, Franzobel are some of the artists
\nyou can see in #newTogether. Andrei Popov, deputy head of the ACF Bucharest: <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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Andrei Popov: Carmen Lidia Vidu reorganised the material, selected
\nfrom the scores of hours of video the most relevant parts for the story and
\ndirection we had agreed on with Cristina Baciu, who did the animation, the
\nsoundtrack and the editing, and did an absolutely amazing job. Carmen Lidia
\nVidu and Cristina Baciu made this film which is more than a documentary or a proof
\nof that moment that we all experienced. This 54-minute documentary is on the
\none hand a sort of dictionary of the ideas and states that we all experienced
\nat the time, and on the other hand it is a reflection, or better yet, a double
\nreflection. It is a mirror for the artists who took part in the project and faced
\nthe camera, and also a mirror reflecting our societies, whether we think of Romania,
\nAustria or any other country. Because essentially we all lived the same
\nexperience, and one of the core merits of the film is that it highlights this. Moreover,
\nwhat the director Carmen Lidia Vidu set out to do was capture both the verbal
\nand the non-verbal, body language, which is why she selected fragments in which
\nthe artists convey messages by both these means. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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The documentary #newTogether has been already screened
\nat the Timi\u015foara National Theatre, at the Classix Festiva in Ia\u0219i, and between
\nMarch 1 and 15 it was available on the New York Segal Center Film Festival on Theater
\nand Performance platform. (A.M.P.)<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The documentary was directed by Carmen Lidia Vidu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":163739,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44685],"tags":[45117,45118,35374,35344,35416,45099],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-163738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-of-culture","tag-newtogether","tag-artists","tag-covid-19","tag-documentary","tag-pandemic","tag-video"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n