مشهور له Romania

At a crossroads in a village, an old water pump stands as a testament to the passage of time.

A series of short stories with bottles.

After the death of her best friend, Cleo tries to carry out her dream: publishing a book of poems. Caught between the pressure of the promise she made and her increasingly fragile relationship with her boyfriend, Arthur, Cleo struggles with grief, longing, and the need for meaning. “Promise Me” is an amateur film about loss, obsession, love, and the fragility of adolescence.

The film confronts the reality of cultural displacement and the search for identity, framed by my family’s own longing for the Romanian culture, absent in American surroundings. There Are No Fir Trees Here is a story about the spaces we inhabit and the yearning for a place that feels like home.

The Resocializing Center at the Neuropsychiatry Hospital 'Alexandru Obregia' is a more or less Utopian attempt to reinstate the mentally ill back into the 'system', into society. Beyond the succes or the failure of this attempt, the emotional memory keeps the inner poetry of some personal worlds - as a way to survive in a chaotic and absurd reality - and, in the end, the relativity of the 'normality' concept.

Commissioned by the Ministry of Oil and filmed in the summer of 1970, in Argeș and Ilfov counties, southern Romania, this film was meant to prevent a dangerous practice particularly widespread among people living in rural areas: the transfer of methane gas into homemade containers as a way of stockpiling ‘emergency’ supplies. The film shows a number of accidents of varying levels of gravity, identified after sixteen days of research in the two counties. Via several sync-sound interviews recorded in villages around the region, this stark educational film reveals the vulnerability of a rural world where, as a result of ignorance and lack of education – and also due to limited availability of regulation gas canisters, an issue which remains unmentioned in the film – people ignored basic safety rules on a daily basis and suffered fatal accidents as a consequence.

People Telling Stories is an industrial, health-and-safety commission turned into an aesthetic exercise by one of the most flamboyant young directors at Sahia. In the early 1980s, Romania experienced a crisis triggered by the so-called ‘Transcendental Movement’ (a variation of the ‘Transcendental Meditation’ movement created by Maharishi Yogi, with some significant involvement from the Romanian Secret Police). Those involved, most of them members of the intellectual elite, were harshly repressed. One of them was Paștina, who lost his right to make documentaries for cinema distribution and was demoted to directing health-and-safety films commissioned to Sahia by various institutions.

Ali's 5th birthday party transforms into a shocking and chaotic ritual improvised by his grandparents. Moments of humor, intimacy, and turmoil, a poignant examination of identity, tradition, and the intricate dynamics within modern families.