ON TOUR IN AMSTERDAM
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN ME AND ME
FILM ON Nina Cassian – FAMOUS Romanian POET AND enfant terrible
In collaboration with Eastwards, ENFF On Tour brings the Dutch premiere of THE DISTANCE BETWEEN ME AND ME by Mona Nicoara and Dana Bunescu in Riato Amsterdam. A documentary about Nina Cassian, Romanian enfant terrible. She was an amazing poet, translator, journalist, pianist, composer and film critic. A fascinating artist whose life was a unique fight between ethics and aesthetics, and who saves herself in fairy tales through times of fascism, communism and an unwanted exile into capitalism. The screening will be followed by Q&A with the director Dana Bunescu and musical performance by Balkan Vrouwenkoor Amsterdam! Come and join us.
Saturday, November 2
15:00 hours
Rialto
Ceintuurbaan 338
1072 GN Amsterdam
Synopsis
We all wrestle with our past. Some more than others. Romanian Jewish avant-garde poet, musician, visual artist, femme fatale, prodigious drinker and terminal smoker Nina Cassian had more than most to wrestle with. Her refuge in the Communist underground during the Fascist 1940s put her first in complicit proximity to the Stalinist regime of the 1950s. Then propelled her on a collision course with the Ceausescu regime in the 1970s and eventually sent her into an unwanted New York exile in 1985, when her poems led to a secret police murder. An intensely personal film about art, belief and politics based on a rich archive of films, music, poems, official television appearances, never-before-seen private recordings and secret police surveillance materials.
FILM DETAILS
Original title: Distanţa dintre mine şi mine
Country: Romania/USA
Year: 2018
Length: 89 min
Director: Mona Nicoara, Dana Bunescu
Idea: Ada Salomon
Editing: Dana Bunescu
Cinematography: Ovidiu Marginean, Rudolf Costin
Sound: Dana Bunescu
Production: Ada Solomon & Alexandru Solomon – Hi Film Productions, Mona Nicoara – Sat Mic Film, Diana Paroiu – Romanian Public Television
Festivals & Awards (selection)
Trieste Film Festival, 2019 | Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest, 2018 – Audience Award | One World Romania, International Human Rights & Documentary Film Festival, Bucharest 2019 | SEEfest, South East European Film Festival in Los Angeles, 2019 | Transylvania International Film Festival, Cluj-Napoca, 2019
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
Together with producers Ada and Alexandru Solomon, who have an even longer personal story with Nina, we embarked on this project of excavating the many layers of mythology and ideology that surround this unique, defiant figure in a country where before 1989 dissent was rare, where “Communist” became an unexamined dirty word in the first minutes of the Revolution, where Jewishness remains to this day a taboo subject, and “feminism” is a joke. We believe that Nina’s story teaches necessary lessons in a time when creative freedom is once again threatened by the rise of authoritarianism and extremism, surveillance returns as a tool for global repression and censorship, and the forces of nationalism bear down on more global, internationalist projects. (Mona Nicoară)
EASTWARDS is a foundation that focuses on making contemporary Eastern European art and culture known to the public in the Netherlands. The first Eastwards project started back in 2015 when two ladies went on a mission to bring the first Romanian film festival to the Netherlands. The idea behind Spotlight: Romania is to combine two artistic disciplines each year, exploring how different mediums collaborate and complement each other in order to reveal how fresh and vibrant contemporary Romania is. This year’s theme is Film & Identity. Find out more at www.eastwards.nl/