Teodora Ana Mihai
Belgium | 2014 | 88 min
World premiere
Language : Romanian
Subtitles : English, French
While her mother goes to work in Italy to provide for their needs, 15-year-old Georgiana looks after her six brothers and sisters in the suburbs of Bacau, Romania. Inspired by her own pain from a similar separation, the filmmaker paints a nuanced and tender portrait of a group of brave yet inevitably vulnerable children who must live with this situation while awaiting the summer.
It begins on a snowy road in the dead of winter. While their mother goes to work in Italy to provide for their needs, 15-year-old Georgiana looks after her six brothers and sisters in the suburbs of Bacau, Romania. "I was born in 1981 under the Ceausescu regime, and at seven years of age, I was forced to live far from my parents who had emigrated from Romania for political reasons. I was later reunited with them in Belgium, but their absence in my childhood left a significant mark." (TAM). It is this pain and the fact that history is repeating itself in her home country - this time for economic and not political reasons - that led to this film. The empathy expressed in the portrait of these children is therefore obvious and profound, while they impatiently await the summer and have telephone conversations with their mother. In this very stylish, intimate and well-distanced work, an adolescent girl strives to keep up the spirits of her siblings, who are as ingenious as they are weakened by absence.
Emilie Bujès