Familiar
\nis Calin Peter Netzer’s most recent feature-length film. It has been shortlisted for the Tallinn Black Nights International Film Festival’s 27th
\nedition.<\/p>\n
\n
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Familar
\nhas been in theaters since late January. Familiar tells the tale of
\na film director who is looking into the history of his own family, pushing the access
\ntowards the family’s most fragile moment of its existence: the immigration to Germany
\nin the 1980s. Immigration which occurred under dubious circumstances and which
\nreveals family secrets, links with the Securitate as well as older wounds, The
\nfilm is built with the minuteness of a detective investigation, where the
\nviewer is invited to be the investigator himself, Calin Peter Netzer said about
\nFamiliar. The screenplay was written by C\u0103lin Peter Netzer and Iulia Lum\u00e2nare. Barbu
\nB\u0103l\u0103\u015foiu and Andrei Butic\u0103 are the directors of photography. On the cast, there
\nare Emanuel P\u00e2rvu, Iulia Lum\u00e2nare, Ana Ciontea, Adrian Titieni, Victoria Moraru
\nand Vlad Ivanov. <\/p>\n
\n
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Winner
\nof the Gopo Award in 2019 in the Best Actor category, Iulia Lum\u00e2nare got significantly
\ninvolved in the making of Familiar, thus resuming her work together with C\u0103lin
\nPeter Netzer. Iulia is a co-scenarist, an actress, a casting director and an
\nacting coach. Here is Iulia Lumanare, speaking about her involvement in Familiar
\nand about the reasons that prompted her to work with filmmaker Calin Peter Netzer
\nfor a second time around<\/p>\n
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The film is inspired by the process myself and C\u0103lin Peter Netzer have been going through, lived and experienced
\nwhen we started writing the screenplay. As, initially, the film was about his
\nfamily’s immigration to Germany in the communist regime, in the early 1980s. After
\nthree months when we looked at the story from each and every angle, what we
\nactually wanted from it appeared clearer to us. So we decided the story started
\noff from the very moment we lived back then, in 2019, when we were thinking
\nabout the film. What we had to say had its origins from that kind of present.
\nAbout the reason why I resumed work with C\u0103lin Peter Netzer, what I can say is
\nthat his previous film, Ana, mon amour, still is an essential experience in
\nmy career. From that moment on I was not just an actress or teacher, I was also
\na screenplay writer. I knew it, I had the intuition of the fact that I
\ncould write it, but C\u0103lin Peter Netzer was the one who put all his trust in me and
\nI shall always be very grateful to him for that. And here we are, we’ve been working
\ntogether for the second time around, because the first time when we worked
\ntogether was indeed something very special, with no conceit or the conflicts
\nthat may flare up when artists work together. And that’s what Familiar is also
\nabout, it is a film about truth, about the things we cannot stand seeing in us,
\nabout those things we would like nobody to see, in fact. That is exactly why
\nthe topic has somehow turned into something about us, even though there is a
\nlot of fiction there, that’s for sure.<\/p>\n
\n
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The
\nChild’s Pose (2013), C\u0103lin Peter Netzer’s third feature-length film, after the
\nmany-time awarded productions Maria and Medal of Honor scooped the Golden Bear
\nin the Best Feature-length Film category as part of the Berlin Film Festival. The
\nChild’s Pose thus became the first Romanian film ever to have scooped such an
\naward. In 2017, C\u0103lin Peter Netzer returned in the Berlinale’s Official
\nSelection with Ana, mon amour and won the Golden Bear for Outstanding Artistic
\nContribution. His films have also been very well received by the public setting
\nbox office records in Romania. A co-writer
\nof the movie script for Ana, mon amour and Familiar, Iulia Lum\u00e2nare spoke
\nabout the connection between the last three films made by C\u0103lin Peter Netzer. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Familiar can be watched jointly with Ana, mon amour and The Child’s
\nPose, it can make some sort of a trilogy together with these two films. In all
\nthese films there is a universe which is very familiar to C\u0103lin Peter Netzer, which
\nhe rendered very realistically. All these films are about identity, about what,
\none way or another, troubles the human being. The quest for identity is a quest
\nwe find in all these characters in the films, irrespective of their plot. And through
\nthis quest of the characters, a lifetime quest, for some of them, the stories acquire
\ntheir universal scope, no matter how specific they may be. As for Familiar, a
\nfilmmaker who wants to make a film explores the past of his own family and
\ntries to restore the ties between the members of his family, yet he finds out
\nhe is unable to do that. That is very difficult as, just as we know, you do not
\nchoose your family, you take your family as it is. Whereas the central character
\nin Familiar fights his family, his parents, trying to raise their awareness
\nregards several things they cannot understand or accept.<\/p>\n
\n
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The
\nproducers of Familiar are C\u0103lin Peter Netzer and Oana Iancu, through Parada Film
\nproduction house. The film is co-produced by Cinema Defacto (France), Ga\u00efjin
\n(France) and Volos Films (Taiwan).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Familiar, in theatres since late January 2024<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":622383,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44685],"tags":[32037,29241,29819,116737,116738],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-622382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-of-culture","tag-family","tag-film","tag-immigration","tag-producer","tag-secrets"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n