Light and natural elements, some of which are as old as the phalansteries followed here by the filmmaker, come into dialogue. Borțun narrates confessions of places and the people who inhabited them, interrogates and gives a voice to those behind these stories of social utopia. A four-chapter video poem, which follows the path of light and the things it sees, hears, and imagines in the Condé-sur-Vesgre Colony, the Phalanstery of Scăieni, in Cité Napoléon, and in the Familistère of Guise.
Undertitled “a video poem about light and utopias,” Andreea Borțun’s film personifies Light, endowing it with the metaphorical meanings of the Enlightenment and the very concrete ones of architecture, on the occasion of its “encounters” with four histories of 19th-century utopias: the societary colony from Condé-sur-Vesgre, the Scăieni phalanstery, the Cité Napoléon, and the Familistère in Guise. With undisguised pathos and admiration, The Light reaches grand social ideas but also small hidden corners of buildings or ruins surviving ideologies. Inside, outside, seeing, searching, quoting, the film articulates a discourse that admirably combines ideals with material realities, often unspectacular ones through which these ideals become possible: corridors, windows, thick walls, vents, private bathrooms, etc. We know all too well that Western architecture has a long history of ignoring everyone’s need for dignity. Cinema also has such a history, but infinitely shorter. For both, there are alternatives, as Borțun upliftingly reminds us. (Călin Boto)
Andreea Borțun is a filmmaker and researcher working interdisciplinary. Andreea uses film as a sensory medium, with a constant mission of developing and deconstructing narrative and visual languages. Her artistic practice brings together her explorations in anthropology, ecological philosophy, and the psychology of the self. Andreea’s work focuses on strengthening the deep connection between people and other living entities, in the hope that it can contribute to building communities based on care. She teaches in the Screenwriting & Film Studies department at the I. L. Caragiale National University of Theatre and Cinematography in Bucharest. In 2014, she co-founded Pustnik, the longest-running international screenwriting residency in Romania, a laboratory where she experiments with methodologies of narrative development for cinema.
