How do we carry on living, afterwards?
When we’ve grown up under a dictatorship, when we’ve shaped our lives under a dictatorship, when it’s part of us.
I started researching my new film while in Rumania, during the last stages of shooting my first documentary, STELLA. Two of the characters in this new film joined me in Braïla, at Stella’s home, where we had just arrived after a clandestine journey from France, and together, we went back to Bucharest, where they shared their story with me.
“All” I had to do then was to carry on carving out my Rumanian trilogy with them. A vast undertaking, even more so than I had at first imagined, and each time I stayed in Roumania, everything I discovered opened up new and unknown territories. This quest, instinctual at first, has profoundly changed the way I look at the world – their world, mine and ours – and it has “shifted” me. The making of this film turned out to be a journey that has profoundly changed me.
So I chose to take my time, time to grow with the film, so as to measure up to the complex task that lay ahead, and to be able to translate it simply into images.
I hope to be able to continue this journey with you, to share, once again, this piece of me with viewers who will tell me about themselves as they discover these unknown characters deep from the heart of far Eastern Europe.
Already two dates: first at the Cinéma du réel, in Paris in March 2012, then at Visions du réel, in Nyon, in April 2012.
Hope to see you soon.
Vanina Vignal, march 2012
Traduction anglaise : Hélène Tison et Louise Williams
