linistea

Watching Nosferatu in cinema was an immersive sensory and archetypal experience, suspending the contact with the rational world. Good unsettling physical acting to represent the encounter between the body and the beyond body forces. Good unsettling voice taking you out of the world. And one of the best phrases heard this year in a movie coming from the cabalist doctor (William Dafoe) about having to face the evil inside so you don't have to face the evil outside. And the final scene, a reminder that the completion of the self comes after the integration, taking in (both scary and joyful) the shadow.

The New Year that never came, one of the best movie about communist Romania, and also a kind of Christmas movie. It captured so well the atmosphere of those times. I remember the fear, the paranoia, the forced lies. The movie was so powerful that it provoked vivid dreams about the past, and flashbacks: the objects, the soundscapes, the type of conversations, everything was so familiar, to the point of being overwhelming. And what I remember the most is the lack of joy. And the joy, like the New Year, never came. After years of corrupted governments, millions of Romanians are ready to vote again for a totalitarian regime. The return to the familiar, the trauma repetition.

I saw the movie at the movie festival in Montreal, and stayed after for the discussion with the director. A thoughtful director of a powerful movie. The movie is a work of love and respect for women in repressive societies, but also more than that. The movie is structured around reading the letters (reminding me of Chantal Akerman's movie, Letters from home) wrote to each other between 2 women, one Romanian, the other Iranian, read on the background of social political events in both countries, mirroring each other's stolen dreams and revolutions. The story is constructed in the imagination of audience, an intimate powerful homage to women, their power, voice and inner force, who, even if repressed, are not victims in their inner worlds.