Click here to read the full article.
Romanian filmmaker Florin Şerban, whose bleak study of systemic racism and toxic masculinity “You Don’t Belong Here” won the Golden Leopard at the recently wrapped Locarno Film Festival, is prepping his next feature
film.
Speaking to Variety at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where “You Don’t Belong Here” is playing in the main competition, the director shared details about his next project, “Ela, or the Diary of a Dutiful Daughter From Romania,” for which casting is already underway.
Written by Adriana Neagoe, “Ela” is “a story about a girl who needs to go away from a family that is very troubled, bounded by alcoholism and violence. She needs to leave before she repeats the story herself, because her life is going in that direction,” said Şerban.
Inspired by the book “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter,” by French existentialist philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir, the film follows a young Romanian woman who keeps a TikTok diary “where she documents the way she wants her life to be,” said Şerban, “not the way her life actually is.”
The film, which has received support from Romania’s CNC, will be produced by Şerban’s Bucharest-based label Fantascope Films, Scharf Film and Avanpost. Şerban is currently searching for international co-producers.
The director arrived in Sarajevo fresh off his Locarno triumph, where alongside the top prize, “You Don’t Belong Here” scooped the festival’s Junior Jury and Europa Cinemas Label awards, as well as a special mention for its young star Teodor Butănescu.
“The hardest part is the premiere,” the director said, over coffee at Sarajevo’s historic Hotel Europe. “Every single moment watching the film on the huge screen for the first time, literally, it’s like you’ve aged two years. I got out of the cinema drained. I was on the verge of tears.”
“You Don’t Belong Here” tells the story of a respected doctor (Adrian Văncică) at a smalltown hospital who’s raising his teenage son, Ioan (Teodor Butănescu), alone after the death of his wife. Unaware that his son is vandalizing cars by night with a gang of masked vigilantes, his world is shaken when he learns that Ioan is a suspect in the murder of a Roma man.
Nearly a decade in the making, the film is a somber exploration of masculinity in Southeast Europe, a study of generational divides and a damning portrait of institutionalized racism against Romania’s Roma community.
For Şerban, it’s also a personal story inspired by his own experience as a father, and a dawning recognition that fatherhood — and the role of men in society — is rapidly changing in contemporary Europe.
“How do we relate to the reality of the world as men in our forties, in our fifties?” the 51-year-old director asked. “There were several changes in the paradigm of how, in this day and age, men should relate to the ones around them. Because this patriarchal model that still exists in the Balkans, that still exists in Europe, little by little, it’s dying. What do we replace it with?”
For Marius, there are no easy answers. Middle-aged, hounded by disappointment, he struggles to understand both his son and the generation he represents, never quite finding a way to articulate his love while holding onto “a reality that is vanishing,” according to the director.
“For this character, living in this place, there’s no space for love. There’s no time for love,” said Şerban. “You always had this idea that the man had to prove himself. The man had to be a magnet for success, money, fame. He can fail, but he has to get right back up. He cannot shed a tear. He has to be strong. A hero.”
“You Don’t Belong Here” marks a return to international festival prominence for the Romanian New Wave veteran, whose debut feature “If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle” premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival in 2010, where it won the Grand Prix.
Şerban took a break from the director’s chair following the 2018 release of the romantic drama “Love 2. America,” focusing instead on Școala de Film, a Bucharest-based film school he founded in 2010 and later expanded with the help of Romanian actress Cosmina Stratan (“Beyond the Hills”) and the U.S.-based Spanish filmmaker Antonio Méndez Esparza (“Life and Nothing More”).
It was among the school’s ranks that the director discovered Butănescu and more than a dozen other actors in “You Don’t Belong Here.” With the school running smoothly in Bucharest, Şerban said he was finally able to return to directing — not least because he also had a story that needed to be told.
“It’s a story that’s very close to me. It’s a story that I feel deeply,” he said. “It’s something that I think about a lot. I think it’s the time to raise these questions.”
The Sarajevo Film Festival runs Aug. 14 – 21.
