So, What’s Freedom? The feature film by the Romanian-born, US-based writer/director Andrei Zincă was screened just as it was filmed, under the starry sky, in the Romanian Days section at the 19th edition of the Transilvania International Film Festival, TIFF, running in Kolozsvár/Cluj-Napoca from July 31 to August 9.
Inspired by true events, the film is a story of love and search for freedom against the background of the 1951 Communist-ordered deportation of 40,000 innocent people in Romania to the Bărăgani Plain, the “Romanian Siberia.” Emil Bazan, a young history teacher, is deported together with his young wife and is forced into a different perspective of history, freedom and everyday life.
The Bărăgan deportations were a large-scale penal action, undertaken during the 1950s by the Romanian Communist regime. Their aim was to forcibly relocate individuals who lived within approximately 25 kilometers of the Yugoslav border (present-day Timiș, Caraș-Severin and Mehedinți counties) to the Bărăgan Plain. The deportees were allowed to return after 1956. Thousands of them died during exile.
“Even though it is a period piece, the political implications of the movie are as much about the present as they are about the past. Freedom always has its terms, it does not matter where, in what system you live in. This is what I realized as an immigrant in America, and this is what my characters in the movie realize also. Basically, this is what attracted me to this story.” – Andrei Zinca declared to TransylvaniaNOW.
The script written by the director is based on the short novel Projects from the Past / Proiecte de trecut by well-known Romanian writer Ana Blandiana, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. The film was shot in chronological order, from the autumn of 2013 to the summer of 2014, with long breaks between each period of filming.
Radu Iacoban, Iulia Lumânare, Cuzin Toma, Olimpia Melinte and Tünde Skovrán star in the movie. During the Q&A session after the screening, nearly the entire complete cast was present. Tünde Skovrán represented the Hungarian community in the movie within the deported group of people.
Actress Tünde Skovrán, (Photo credits: backstage)
“Among the deported people, there were also Hungarians, of course, as there were Romanians and also Saxons (Transylvanian Germans). The director wished to show this cultural diversity,” Tünde Skovrán, the Transylvanian Hungarian actress currently living in Los Angeles, told TransylvaniaNOW.
Transilvania Film will release the film in Romania in 2020. “Double 4 Studios has the distribution rights worldwide. A USA release is in our plans for 2021,” Zincă also said. The film is a Romanian/USA co-production.
Andrei Zincă left Romania in 1982, and after living in Latin America for a while, he moved to the USA in 1988, where he worked in Spanish language TV programs. He returned to Romania in 2006, where he shot the TV series La Urgență, (an ER-type series), as well as his first feature film as a director, Puzzle for a Blind Man / Puzzle pentru un orb (2013), produced by Castel Film Studios.
Featured photo: deportations, Wikipedia.ro
