Adrian Sitaru

Portrait

In Romania, an Eastern European country of twenty-one million inhabitants, to everybody’s astonishment not a single film was exhibited in the year 2000. During the next ten years, if it is possible, the astonishment became even bigger, because the fresh Romanian new wave made a hit at the festivals all over the world. After the new millennium depression, the cinema of the country rose from the dead, and began to flourish thanks to several young and ambitious ‘rioters’. Adrian Sitaru is one of those directors, whose films strongly define the spirit of the world cinema of the 2000’s.

As a matter of fact, the works of this generation can be described via some common attributes, even though, according to Sitaru, this could have happened by accident or by a simple miracle as well. Their minimalist movies are full of great realistic power, close to the style of ‘cinéma vérité’. These projects are financed on the basis of low budgets (Sitaru’s first production was made without any state support, and he wants to stay independent in the future), and built mainly on the very talented actors of Romania. Furthermore, they usually part from the classical rules of editing, and that is also the point of Sitaru’s biggest invention. As we see, his works instinctively follow the trend of the new wave, but in their own particular way.

Adrian Sitaru was born in Timişoara in 1971. After receiving his Computer Science Degree, he moved to Bucharest to study film directing. He shot principally shorts and films for television until the big success of the short Waves in 2007 which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and won numerous prizes afterwards. His first feature, Hooked, which was selected at the Venice film festival in 2008, tells the weekend-long story of a couple whose original plans are deranged by a stranger. Under the effect of an unknown person who hooked on them without a question, the lovers discover that their relationship is in deep crisis, and begin to look for its origin. As their stories suggest, Adrian Sitaru’s films are neither promoting some thesis, nor judging human beings. They speak more about life in general than political background, contrary to other Romanian directors, who were also children under Ceauşescu’s regime. To verify this, let’s take the plot of Waves, which takes place on a crowded beach, where bored people are just watching each other. Lying in the sun, the middle aged couple is scandalized by a young girl sitting next to them, who gives a massage to an old man. In the end the wife tells her husband resignedly: “It is democracy, darling. Some democracy.”

Sitaru’s art is far from the idea of depicting the exotic and victimised nation of Eastern Europe, as for instance Herta Müller in her novels or Cristian Mungiu in his films. He is engaged with a more personal way of storytelling, and quotes Lars von Trier, Gus van Sant and Mike Leigh as models. His latest film, Best Intentions, is also based on his own experiences, because the story exactly happened to the director and his parents. The main character, Alex (Bogdan Dumitrache) wants to help his mother, lying on a hospital sick bed as a result of a stroke. The worrying son is ready to do everything to help the patient, but he can’t be sure which the best advice is. The topic is similar to Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, but contrary to Puiu’s motionless minimalism, Sitaru chooses something spiritual and regularly changes his directing according to the different characters’ points of view. Just as in the case of Hooked, he frequently uses POV shots, rarely adopting an objective angle. This trademark keeps the tension of the audience, which has a serious lack of knowledge, while it can easily identify itself with the characters. In this way, Sitaru expresses the desperate feeling of helplessness and uselessness in a deeply human sense.

By Janka Barkoczi