These days,
Adrian Sitaru is to be found on set - where, as a sort of break from a series of shorts and a new feature film, he's the co-director of a TV series which all those involved believe/hope to kind of change the face of Romanian television. Paradoxically, he's a heap of patience, but he can't keep still - if he could film while sleeping, he wouldn't take any breaks.
I don't know why I'm doing this, why I need to put this on film... why I'm no longer making music, as I did before falling in love with cinema. Probably because its the least boring form of expression: you write, work with actors, create an image concept, shoot, edit and, as a director, you do this stuff without touch-ing a thing. Well, maybe the keyboard.... So you have a final product that you didn't touch, that you made from words, discus-sions and imagination. It's fascinating, especially when people appreciate it. I think cinema is a legal drug - and I like to produce much more than consume it.
"The Sitaru boom" occurred in a strikingly similar manner to the man himself: slow and resolute. The first cut of his feature de-but,
Hooked, had been finished since 2007 (a few of us, not too many, saw it that very summer during a festival which won't be mentioned here), but its official premiere took place only in 2009. So...what hap-pened in the meantime? What happened was that his short film,
Waves (the seaside story of a native family, a foreign tourist, a chubby kid and an edgy gipsy boy) took Locarno's Golden Leopard. What happened was that the whole world (critics and producers alike) was suddenly interested in
Hooked - a three character (and a few other people) fable, filmed on video, for a fistful of dollars (which means independent from the National Film Center and other similar organizations), a sort of
Knife in the Pond (as I called it back then), simple and razor-sharp, whose gimmick (everything is filmed from the characters' POV, without any connecting shots), new only for Romanian cinema, doesn't tire you at all. Quite the contrary... What happened was that a few "crazy" people were ready to invest in the young director - consequently, the film was blown up to 35mm and took award after award, in festivals too many to mention. And, finally, what happened was that after the premiere we all grew impatient - when would the next film be ready? And what will it be? The answer kind of caught us on the wrong foot...
I thought about my project, Domestic, when I realized I had many stories with animals, stories from my personal life, stories from which only very late, at an adult stage, I learned something. And I thought they'd be very good for a film. Then I realized that all people have stories with animals, that these animals are part of our lives more than we think and, what's more, that we are like animals more than we think.
Not one, but two shorts - extremely well-connected with each other and meant to be watched together. In
The Cage (awarded at the 2010 Berlinale), a young boy finds an injured bird and brings it home, where he is met with indifference (by his mother) and irritation (by his father) - an excuse for a family portrait (the same one featured in
Waves - Adrian Titieni, Clara Voda, Vlad Voda) which could be sarcastic if it weren't so touching, and which could pass for sad if it weren't bursting with fierce humor and infinite subtlety. In
Lord, a neighborhood scoundrel (Sergiu Costache - the little gypsy from
Waves -and a true revelation) earns "a living" by snatching dogs from parks and then pos-ing as the good Samaritan in front of their owners (who immediately pay the reward). One day, he's left with a Pekinese that "grandpa" doesn't want back... and not for all the obvious reasons. The dialogue goes from sparkling to juicy and back - consequently, the viewers laugh and laugh...until the perfectly calculated and perfectly sad ending. Why a short film (well, two actually) after a long one? Why not?
The stories were already written and since I didn't have money for the second feature but I had some financial support from the National Film Center, I did The Cage and Lord with love... Many people wondered why; I don't think somebody would find it strange if a writer wrote some short prose after writing a novel. You write books and make films because you like the story, whether it's short or long.
Now, what can one wish for, first and foremost - the long delayed feature, a semi-autobiographical story about a young man who helps his sick mother "for love, with best intentions," or a compilation of shorts, full of fun and nicely done (forgive the pun!)?
Now I have five stories, including one about a cat and one about a rabbit, stories which could work separately but which in Domes-tic will work like chapters... like a... let's say..."Apartment Building" saga. All the stories involve people/neighbors living in the same apartment building in Bucharest. For me, people living in a house are domesticated in the same way animals living in a cage are. It's not simple living in an apartment building, not even for animals - an apartment building seems to be something similar to a farm... but so far so good. On the other hand, I've lived and I'm still living in an apartment building... maybe it's just a question of personal behavior, of domestic versus wild.
In other words, we have talent, we have sensibility, we have humor, we have an insatiable need to make films and we have enough wisdom to know where to go (and how to get there).
As far as the Romanian New Wave is concerned, I don't know what my place is. Honestly, I'm not too concerned about this; I hope to be on the side of good films. That's something critics should say.
And I did.
