Born in Britain, Tom Wilson moved
\nto Romania in 2002, after finishing university: <\/p>\n
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It was 1999
\nwhen I first came to Romania and I was just about to start university. Me and a
\nfriend decided that we do a very low-budget trip around Eastern Europe. (…)
\nRomania back then! (..) It was crazy. Crazy in an amazing way. For me, coming
\nfrom the very organised, rigid society of England and to come to Romania you
\nfelt a real kind of sense of freedom in a positive way. Everything was all so
\nchaotic. You could tell that this was a society that was recovering from a
\nrevolution. But it was brilliant. Everyone I met was so nice. We went to Cabana
\nBabele, we hitchhiked up to Cota 2000, which is kind of a hotel high way up the
\nmountain and just the stories people were telling us about the mafia, the
\ngovernment, bears, wolves, corruption, dodgy policemen, people working abroad…
\nIt was amazing. For me it was like a fairytale, Balkan fantasy world. I’d never
\nexperienced anything like it and I thought it was amazing. So we were in Cabane
\nBabele, we got caught in a thunder storm, we had to take shelter and I met a
\nRomanian artist, Vlad Nanca, who still is a very well-known contemporary
\nRomanian artist, and we made very good friends and he invited me back. I came
\nback in the year 2000 and I DJ-ed at the seaside at 2 Mai and I never lost the
\nconnection. I met a really good group of friends, I started seeing a Romanian
\ngirl, I had a Romanian girlfriend, and so from 1999 until 2002 I was studying
\nat University and I was coming back every holiday whenever I could, to meet
\npeople. I think I have really happy memories of Romania at that time. Because
\nnow Romania is a developed country, it’s a European country, it’s in the
\nEuropean Union. Back then it felt like a kind of post-Soviet,
\npost-revolutionary crazy place to be in and I loved that. I liked feeling that
\nI was in this kind of forgotten part of the world.<\/p>\n
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Tom could never imagine himself working 9 to 5 in a bank
\nin London, so when he came to Bucharest, he did many different freelance jobs:
\nhe worked as a journalist, even collaborating for a while with Radio Romania
\nInternational, as a DJ, and, since more recently, as a film director. He now
\nmakes commercials for international brands. As a film maker, Tom Wilson is best
\nknown in Romania for a documentary first screened at the Transylvania
\nInternational Film Festival in 2013. One year later, he won an important
\nnational film award, the Gopo award for best documentary. Tom Wilson:<\/p>\n
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It’s called The Bucharest Experiment and
\nit’s partly fictional partly true so you have to watch the film to find out
\nwhat parts are fictional and what parts are true because the fiction is there
\nfor a purpose. I used a fictional device to make a point about modern Romanian
\nsociety. I made it on nothing. I spent 250 euros making this film and a lot of
\ntime and if you compare that to the budgets of even a small independent film is
\ngoing to cost you tens of thousands of euros. Most of the Romanian films
\nnowadays cost half a million euros easily, so for me to be able to make a film
\nfor 250 euros was fantastic. It was an investment of a lot of time and a lot of
\nenergy, not just on my half, as well as on the half of the ordinary people that
\nare in it because the ‘actors’ weren’t actors, they were ordinary people. (…)
\nI’m an outsider in the film world, I’m not connected to all the big producers
\nand the production houses, so I’m really grateful to all the people that helped
\nme and that gave me advice, told me where to go, which festivals to apply to.<\/p>\n
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A promoter of
\nRomanian arts abroad with three projects financed by the Romanian Cultural
\nInstitute, Tom Wilson also contributed to a directory entitled 100 to Watch,
\na listing of the 100 most talented artists in Romania. Having lived here for so
\nlong, Tom Wilson says Romania is by no means an idyllic country. Some of the
\nthings he dislikes most include the Bucharest traffic, the homeless dogs,
\ncorruption and some people’s racism about the gypsy and foreigners. He says,
\nhowever, that Romanians do not have such a negative image in Britain as we
\nmight think:<\/p>\n
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I think,
\nactually, if you go there, Romanians have quite a good image in Britain. Most
\nof what you see and hear is created by the media because you have very
\nunpleasant right-wing newspapers like The Daily Mail whose job it is to create
\nhatred among people and to stir up this distrust of immigrants because it fits
\ntheir political agenda, and that’s horrible. (…) If you actually go to England
\nand talk to people, I would say they’re not pro-Romanian, they’re indifferent.
\nBritain is a multicultural society, London is the most multicultural city in
\nthe world from what I’ve seen and you have people from all over the world. (..)
\nWhen you actually go to England as a Romanian people just treat you as a normal
\nhuman being, that’s what I would like to think. (…) I’d like to think that
\npeople treat Romanians as they would treat any other European citizen.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A freelance journalist, DJ and film maker, Tom Wilson has been living in Romania since 2002.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":175396,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46047],"tags":[46061,46060],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-175395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-expat-in-romania-en","tag-the-bucharest-experiment","tag-tom-wilson"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n