National Competition 1

Take Me to the Water

Fragments of memories are brought to the surface by the Blue Danube Waltz, revealing the lesser-known history of the Danube – the Black Sea Canal. While borders between filmmaker and actress become blurry, languages and layers of the past intertwine.

We Lived Slowly in Times of Peace

dir. Kristina Jacot | Duration 8'

Quiet rituals, comforts of daily life, memory flickers through grainy traces. Time quietly slips away. Peace, at times, is merely the absence of war.

Patchwork with Grandpa and Grandma

dir. Alma Buhagiar | Duration 7'

The director's grandparents, who have been together for over 60 years, recall (and re-edit) fragments of their life together. The film, originally intended as part of a video installation, captures a return to a nonlinear past, while also probing how textures and the materiality of images can be inscribed onto the cinema screen.

Erogenesis

dir. Xandra Popescu | Duration 15'

In the aftermath of a mysterious disaster, the few humans left find themselves unable to reproduce the species. All hope lies in the hands of five women who have developed the technology to create human life outside the body.

Light that Never Quite Returns the Same

dir. Andreea Borțun | Duration 24'

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.

Fracti

dir. Lavinia Petrache | Duration 6'

Humans live their routines inside an ethereal village floating in the sky. What happens when one of them causes the world to end?

I Am Also Part of the Three Turns

dir. Monica Maria Moraru | Duration 15'

Relying on oral and fragmentary histories, I AM ALSO PART OF THE THREE TURNS traces the effects of a destructive earthquake in Bucharest and a concurrent flood it caused in a small town in Buzău, during a period of nationalistic urbanization in Communist Romania.