In the imposing Auditorium of Radio France, where the light falls discreetly over the warm wood of the stage and every sound fills the space with emotion, Teodor Coman carefully prepares his viola.

He is the principal violist of the National Orchestra of France, where he has been active for over three decades, a professor, chamber musician, and one of the Romanians who have built a remarkable career in France.

He has no magic recipes for a successful career. Instead, he speaks of practice, patience, and passion. He calls the connection between people “transmission.”

“We are on this planet to transmit,” he says. “Through the orchestra, through chamber music, through teaching. We shouldn’t keep the information to ourselves.”

***

I met Teodor Coman on a Sunday afternoon at Radio France, at the end of a rehearsal. He is one of two Romanian musicians who are part of the National Orchestra of France, led by another Romanian: conductor and musical director Cristian Măcelaru.

He grew up in a family where music was present every day. His father was a violin teacher, and the house vibrated with music. From the age of 5 to 14, he also studied the violin, but felt that something was missing.

“I was looking for a deeper tone, a different vibration.”

He then switched to the viola, which represented not just a change of instrument, but the discovery of an identity.

“The viola is between the cello and the violin, a sort of cement. I’ve always felt the same way in my relationships with people. I had this desire to cement relationships between them.”

In 1986, while still a student at the Conservatory in Bucharest, he won a prize at the Maurice Vieux International Competition in Lille. He could have stayed in the West back then and escaped the dictatorial regime in Romania. He even received two job offers, but turned them down.

“I wanted to finish the Conservatory,” he tells us now, referring to the Romanian school of music with admiration and respect.

He describes his years of study in Bucharest as fundamental to his artistic formation. That is precisely why he returned to Romania during a period when many musicians were choosing exile. The decision was to cost him, however: after his return, the communist authorities drastically restricted the ability of musicians to leave the country.

“The Securitate officer who was Elena Ceaușescu’s right-hand man, because she signed off on departures, wrote in a report that one in two Romanian musicians stays abroad. From that moment on, departures were over.”

The road to France would open up again in 1989, through a succession of events that he still views today as a series of providential coincidences. He first left for Greece, where he had been offered a teaching position in Thessaloniki, but because he received his visa too late, he found that his position had been filled in the meantime. So he called an acquaintance in Paris and managed to compete for and win a audition at the Orchestre National d’Île-de-France for the principal viola position. Five years later, he joined the prestigious Orchestre National de France (the National Orchestra of France), where he still plays today.

“Who was the principal conductor here at the Orchestra of France when you were hired?”

“Charles Dutoit. Over the years, I’ve known Charles Dutoit, Kurt Masur, Daniele Gatti, Emmanuel Krivine.”

The 1989 Revolution caught him in Paris, but his wife had remained at home. “Bullets ricocheted between her feet. I was going crazy when I saw the footage on TV. I wanted to go home.”

In the meantime, Ceaușescu fell, and his wife, a violinist, also managed to reach France and built her own musical career, having been active for 35 years with the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra. They have been together for 40 years.

“Romania gave me my training. France confirmed it and gave me confidence,” says the Romanian-French violist.

How difficult is it to be a musician with the National Orchestra of France, where the standard is very high?

“For example, we’re playing some contemporary works with Cristian Măcelaru. There is a composer I adore: Thierry Escaich; he’s not the only one, but I adore him. And we have one of these works that we’re going to perform.

There’s no reference for contemporary works that have never been performed before. It’s the first time.

We also have a piece by an American woman, created in 2013 in America. There, a reference exists. You can find recordings on YouTube and figure out what it’s all about. Except you still have to look at the notes, to decipher these contemporary works. Yesterday, I spent four hours practicing at home.

At the same time, you’re not alone. You have to be so detached from the score that you can listen to what’s happening, to be more about listening than playing.”

He never speaks of the two countries as competing worlds, but rather as completing each other. He feels “half Romanian, half French.”

And when he returns to Bucharest, meetings with his former Conservatory classmates are almost ritualistic. After decades and destinies scattered across the globe, their core has remained surprisingly united. Alongside other Romanian musicians playing in European orchestras, they form the Contempo Paris quintet.

“How do you maintain your interest in the profession after such an extensive career, ensuring it doesn’t become just a repetitive job?

That is a musician’s greatest challenge: not to become functional in the bad sense of the word. It’s easy for that to happen. But if you aim to do chamber music concerts, festivals, teach kids, do pedagogy, teach your own kids this music… So, if you continue doing the things you came to this planet for, there’s no way you’ll become merely functional. That’s the only secret. There is a second option: you hang up your instrument, say ‘Great, I got into the National Orchestra of France,’ and rest on your laurels.”

Because if you don’t practice for a day, you fall back two days. And the next day, you have even more ground to make up.”

Throughout Teodor Coman’s words, the idea constantly resurfaces that the Romanian school of music possesses something impossible to put into words. He refers to a shared sensitivity, a way of listening to and breathing the music – something he has always found whenever he has played alongside other Romanian musicians.

This sensitivity has left its mark on the entire National Orchestra of France ever since Maestro Cristian Măcelaru took leadership, says Teodor Coman.

“We call him Cristian, as we have a very open relationship with the maestro.

Cristian has brought down the volume of the strings significantly, so that when a wind soloist has a passage, they aren’t forced to push. From this combination emerges a diaphanous sound.

How would you describe Cristian Măcelaru’s tenure at the National Orchestra of France?

As an incredible evolution of the orchestra. Many positions were renewed as well; there were many retirements. And the level of the young musicians is absolutely fantastic. In my day, these young people could have been international soloists.”

“It’s strange that there is money for the Enescu Festival, but not for Enescu’s manuscripts.”

In recent years, one of the National Orchestra of France’s projects has been recording the complete works of George Enescu under the baton of Cristian Măcelaru. The violist describes the experience almost as a microscopic research process.

“We came to zoom in on every musical landscape, on every single note. What Cristian Măcelaru has done with Enescu is extraordinary.”

“And how did your French colleagues respond to Enescu’s music? I know there are musicians who say Enescu is difficult to interpret, that it requires a lot of study.

They responded very well. For them, it’s a pleasure every time they go to Romania for the Enescu Festival.”

Enescu is so brilliant that he could have written in any style, which, in fact, he did. He was very different from one work to the next. He is up there somewhere; we touch him, we feel him, but we can’t grasp him with both hands.

Why?

Because he doesn’t have just one personal style. For example, there are composers who always write in the same style. That’s their trademark. That’s how they’re recognized across the entire planet. But Enescu – and this is his genius – could write in any style he wanted. And every single work is something completely different. That’s why he’s so difficult to interpret.

Otherwise, I know about the story with Enescu’s manuscripts; I saw your investigation. What seems strange to me is that there is money for the Enescu Festival, but not for Enescu’s manuscripts. How is that possible? We’re talking about the exact same thing: culture.”

While George Enescu’s manuscripts remain stored in containers, as we have shown on Cultura la dubă, the world’s great orchestras are performing his music more and more frequently, especially after last year marked 70 years since the composer’s passing, making access to performance rights for his music more accessible.

Teodor Coman says he hopes to live to see the day when he returns to the Enescu Festival to perform in a new concert hall, the kind Bucharest deserves to have.

“At Sala Palatului, people fought to improve the acoustics. I know because my father worked in television; I knew the staff and the effort they put in there. But it’s a hall built for speaking, for congresses. The Atheneum is fantastic, but it’s too small, we can’t push the walls back.

The hall exacerbates what we do on stage; it acts like an amplifier. We send out energies in a synergy that projects into the hall. You don’t receive it the same way as in a cathedral, for instance. In a cathedral, it reverberates too much, it sounds like a bathroom.

The sound bounces around and doesn’t penetrate you the way it does in a concert hall. And ultimately, it’s this exact impact that sound has on a person in a real concert hall that keeps them coming back.”

In France, access to classical music concerts is increasingly relaxed, with fewer formalities. Many French people head to the concert hall straight from work, wearing jeans and a shirt, and that isn’t a problem at all.

‘Whether they come dressed up or in jeans, the important thing is that they come and appreciate the music. Because it is the language that unites us all, no matter how we are dressed.’

The child who started studying the violin at age 5 has now dedicated over 50 years to music. He hopes to pass on the joy of playing to new generations, whether as a full career or as studying an instrument for personal growth and mental development.

“Studying an instrument is similar to yoga. It’s self-discovery. It pushes your limits to places you didn’t even think you were capable of reaching. It’s a mental battle. Everything takes place within a single square meter for 2 to 8 hours a day. I used to practice up to 8 hours a day before entering the Conservatory.

It’s an inner journey. You learn to breathe, to regulate your breath, to see what your expressive possibilities are, it’s something vast, without limits.”

***

This material is part of the “France Week” series, a Cultura la dubă project supported by BNP Paribas.

The post Teodor Coman, principal violist of the National Orchestra of France: “Studying an instrument is similar to yoga. It pushes your limits to places where you didn’t even think you were capable.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

Having left Romania during her doctorate, almost convinced that she would not work as a director of photography in the film industry, after meeting Romanian misogyny full-on, Diana Vidrașcu got to Paris in 2013, studying at Sorbonne, and France gave her the chance to do what she had dreamed of doing.

It has enriched her cultural universe and not only she is working as a director of photography, but also as a film stock restoration specialist and the films she has directed were selected at major film festivals such as Locarno, Berlinale, Rotterdam IFFR or Chicago IFF.

A curious artist and determined to express through images, Diana Vidrașcu continues to fight each day in a field dominated by men, who still questions a woman’s capacity to operate a camera on her shoulder.

“It is the same thing for me to shoot a fixed shot, nice or move the 16kg camera in a certain way as it is for a man. Because it is about what is inside the frame and how you create a world through images.”, says Diana.

***

I first met Diana in autumn 2025, during Radu Jude’s retrospective at the Centre Pompidou and MK2 Library in Paris. I learned about her work as a director of photography and went on to discover more of her story, in the France Week project.

We met again in june. It was a rainy afternoon in Paris, and Diana was in a short break between shoots.

Diana Vidrașcu was born in Iași and remained there until the age of 14, when her father received a job in Timișoara, so she moved there with her family. At high-school in Timișoara she started taking photography, but this art form was already present in her family.

“My grandfather and mother were both passionate about analog photography. We had a small improvised dark room at home so I got to know the subject from the start. And in Timișoara I started going to the students photography club – Iris, that was in the same building with our high-school. I think that is what made me curious, so I got closer to photography.

I then made some contacts in different artistic fields and the idea of an admission to UNATC, at cinematography. I knew that I didn’t want to do photography in a classic sense, but try something that in closer to film, to cinema.

I was admitted on the first try and at 18 I moved to Bucharest by myself.

The first year was very difficult, and in my second year of college I went into a kind of sad period, in which I would seriously question whether I would have a career in this field or not.

I was the only girl in my class, out of about 10 students. At first the mood wasn’t very friendly from the direction of the teachers, so to say. I even received a comment on the first day of college that «this is not a woman’s career and you won’t last for more than a semester.»

All these experiences leave a mark, especially at this age, when you inevitably compare yourself to others. Eventually I survived, I got good grades, I graduated in the top of the class and I made a lot of films, which I think mattered the most. When I go back and speak about my school years, I can say that I went to a relatively good college, I had a solid education from a professional point of view, but on a human level, it was complicated.

How did you endure? Did you feel like giving up at times?

I think I was supported a lot by my circle and my parents, who, even if they didn’t fully understand my career choice, respected my decision and supported me both emotionally and financially.

In my second year, I started a second degree distance learning program: Communication at SNSPA. So in the end, I graduated from two universities, but I don’t use the second one at all and barely even list it on my CV.

During her study years, she tried to work behind the camera as much as possible, but opportunities for women in the industry were rare. She collaborated with Radu Gabrea and worked as a set assistant for Radu Muntean. Since she didn’t have ongoing projects, she started a PhD at CESI, studying image and communication theory.

That PhD would become her launching pad to Paris, earning her a study semester at the Sorbonne in 2013.

After spending three months in Paris, she did an internship at an experimental film distribution company, where she is now employed as a restorer of old heritage films.

“I learned film restoration on the job, and then I attended a school in Bologna. The FIAF school is there, which is quite respected for film restoration.

The place where I work now is quite special because it’s a distribution company, but not in the traditional sense of the word. We have a very diverse catalog of films, but they are all experimental, so it’s somewhat very niche. And generally, we only hold rights for physical editions, Blu-ray collector’s editions, DVD, or VOD.”

Contact with film stock, both in the restoration process and during shooting, is an essential component of Diana’s work, so much so that she is already recommended in the French film industry for working on film stock.

“I’ve shot mostly on film stock, people saw my work, sought me out to shoot other films with them, and in the meantime, I built a reputation in the industry. But of course, I shoot on digital too. I’m happy to shoot digitally if given the chance, especially if it’s the best option for the film.

And I’m not orthodox in the sense that every film must be shot on film stock. I believe the script will choose its own format. But indeed, people come to me for that. So I could say it has become a bit of a specialization.”

Still, making films on film stock is a luxury nowadays, says Diana, and sometimes this causes financial unfairness toward other departments.

“There are many directors who write thinking about how their film would look on film stock, but the truth is that very often directors, especially young ones, want to do this almost out of a fetishization of the image, to the detriment of the positions and salaries of certain technicians. They are willing to sacrifice sets, to sacrifice important scenes from the script, causing major imbalances that I do not support.

I don’t think we should make art on 35mm at all costs, to the point where the crew gets paid nothing and we suffer with overtime and impossible schedules for it.”

Have you noticed a trend in this regard here in France, an increased interest in shooting on film stock?

“It’s clear that for a few years now, in advertising, fashion, and beauty, a lot is being shot on film stock, even on small formats like 16mm and Super 8: they are very popular right now.

When it’s Fashion Week, you see nothing but people with Super 8 cameras walking around town, and all the professional 16mm cameras are rented out too. Here I really think it’s a trendy aesthetic. And Paris is often at the forefront of visual trends.”

Beyond her work as a cinematographer and film restorer, influenced by her almost daily work within the experimental cinema realm, Diana Vidrașcu wanted to develop her own cinematographic language, combining photography and moving images differently than in classic, narrative cinema.

She participated as a director at the London BFI Experimenta in 2017, and later her films were selected for numerous festivals, including Locarno, Berlinale Forum Expanded, Rotterdam IFFR, and Chicago IFF.

The film “Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream?” (2019) is an exploration of tectonic activity in the Azores Islands, Portugal. The film deconstructs and recomposes 16mm film negatives and was awarded prizes at the Image Science New York (2019) and Toronto Image festivals.

“Le Silence des sirènes” (2019) is an experimental work inspired by Kafka, combining documentary and fiction to depict a young woman’s journey to Martinique. And in “What Time is Made Of” (2017), Diana Vidrașcu explores childhood memory through 16mm film recovered from the sea.

Participating in major festivals brought Diana even more collaborations as a cinematographer.

“The fact that I started making films as a director also opened up new connections with other directors who, in turn, make somewhat different films, not strictly experimental, but less classical, non-narrative.

I like that experimental cinema isn’t repetitive at all, it’s very rich, even if it’s marginal cinema or cinema that is less known to the general public, but where there are so many languages, ways of working, and overlaps with contemporary art.”

“I think it was an important discovery to come here and find out, to learn what a different kind of cinema means than the one I studied in school, but I think most of all I wanted to leave the professional film environment in Romania because it seemed very complicated to work in that kind of atmosphere, in those kinds of professional relationships. Back then it was quite an aggressive and difficult environment, it felt almost impossible for me to be taken seriously, or to find my creative voice, to grow professionally, or to build a stable crew.

Because in the end, as a cinematographer, you are responsible for a team of X people. It can be two people or it can be twenty. But you also need to have the leadership capacity, and people have to listen to you and trust you.

Did you feel it was easier here?

Yes, definitely. It is still very hard here too, you have to fight twice as hard as a woman. It remains difficult in this profession, it’s hard to assert yourself, there are always issues with producers.

But I feel that there is still a different work ethic and that misogyny isn’t exacerbated, as was the case in Romania.

I don’t know if things will be good for my generation. Maybe for the generation coming after me things will be better. I try to fight for the women technicians I have on my crew, and for my female colleagues, so that they have an easier life than the one I had when I was 25. But it remains complicated.”

This year, for the first time in history, a woman won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography: Autumn Durald Arkapaw, for the film “Sinners”. The news went around the world because it was something unprecedented. Women in this industry continue to face stereotypes.

“There are many women who have technical jobs, and I don’t know how many people question their abilities. It seems to me that we suffer from a sort of false reputation, where the cinematographer is supposed to be a strong person who only knows what the focal length of a lens is.

The whole industry has contributed to this simplistic image of a position that is eminently masculine and technical, when, in fact, our work is based much more on a visual education that we receive, on a culture that we can accumulate, and on the ability to translate a text into a visual work. I find it very unfair to keep saying that a cinematographer is usually or would better be a man so that he is capable of working with a heavy camera.

It’s just as hard for me to make a stable, beautiful frame or move a certain way with that 16 kg camera as it is for a man. Because it’s about the content of the frame and how you create the world as an image.

In fact, as a woman, you are constantly facing a self-image problem, from the moment you leave the house and take a taxi until you arrive at work, meet someone who is or isn’t a colleague, go to the hospital, etc. These are problematic interactions at all levels of society, and this kind of discrimination manifests in every industry, it’s not just in the film industry.

But it’s clear that my position is very targeted and I have to make a constant, conscious effort. And in Romania, I felt like I was fighting windmills. I had no chance of making any real progress, and I felt that very quickly. And I left Romania when I was 25.

Has anything changed?

Maybe, I’m not sure, but now I see female colleagues in the industry who have very respectable careers, such as Ana Drăghici, a person I admire very much, or Boróka Biró, who is also very recognized and successful, and I am very happy for them.”

As a film restorer, Diana says her work can be compared to that of a detective, because it involves research and documentation before actually coming into contact with the film stock.

“We also need to understand the whole context: how the film was made, what kind of production it was, who worked on it. I need to know everything about how that specific shoot was done, the special effects techniques, or the interventions on the film stock, to understand how they were created so I can repair or reproduce them.”

And as a director, she wants to intellectually challenge the audience in a different, more subtle way than classic cinema, which tells stories through a script. Diana Vidrașcu’s films are stories told through images rather than words.

“I have always wanted the audience to be able to leave the cinema after seeing my film with more questions than they had before coming to see it. I want the film to be able to spark questions, a debate, or a kind of doubt in the person who watched it. And not necessarily to give immediate satisfaction, because I think that’s what narrative film does. It gives you the satisfaction of having understood a story, of having understood a character’s arc, whereas I have always wanted my film to be able to plant seeds of doubt in the viewer, rather than certainty.”

“I’m curious how you are perceived among French people or foreigners when you introduce yourself as a filmmaker from Romania?”

“I think we are living in a favorable moment as filmmakers from Romania. Generally, the reactions are very good, and not necessarily just in France, but across Europe and in the States. Romanian cinema is very well-known and appreciated, and people in the industry respect it a lot. Everyone will have a director’s name or two as a reference, or a film that impressed them greatly.

Romania is seen as a kind of magic ground that produces films and brilliant minds in cinema.”

“And do you think that helps you too? Is it like a positive business card?”

“Honestly, these kinds of discussions, about where you come from or what school you went to, come up at a later point. In general, what matters first and foremost is your portfolio, what recommendations you have, who you’ve worked with before, and what projects you’ve shot. And later on, we start talking about origins, film school, and your initial background.”

Diana Vidrașcu says she belongs to a generation of young Romanians who wanted to leave Romania and didn’t look back much. She visits her relatives back home, but doesn’t necessarily feel a professional desire to return to Romanian soil. France opened her mind and creative universe, and Paris has become an international film hub where she has the chance to work with directors from all over the world.

Paris is a unique phenomenon in itself. I live in an international environment, both professionally and personally, surrounded by close friends and relationships. I’m not just surrounded by French people. My partner is Swedish, I speak Swedish as well, I have friends of many nationalities, at work I speak French and English in almost equal measure, while with my partner at home I speak French and Swedish. My life now happens across at least four languages.

Paris is very cosmopolitan in that regard. And that reflects even more in daily life if you work in the cultural sector. Today I’m going to an art opening, tomorrow to another cultural event. Here it’s like this non-stop.

It’s a very vibrant life, and it’s clear that this has helped me enormously in my professional life as well. Paris is simply extraordinary for anyone working in art or culture.

And there are also fantastic opportunities in terms of funding and institutional support. Film funding doesn’t come from just a single place, it’s not just the CNC. There are galleries, institutions, private collectors, etc.

But even in France, everyone is very worried about next year’s elections and what might change if the far right comes to power. All these funding possibilities I’m talking about, and this broad range of support sources, could change drastically, or the topics and recipients could become restricted.

At major film festivals, the role of the artist in relation to politics has been widely debated in recent years. How do you see this role? Do you think an artist should express themselves politically?

Definitely, I feel that every gesture we make is political. And art carries an enormous responsibility; if art isn’t what speaks about the political world, I don’t know who should. Economists?! I think it’s very important to maintain a critical spirit, and I feel that we make political films no matter what we do, through the way we shoot, through the methods we use, through what we say.

Sometimes it’s not so obvious whether the story carries a specific weight or message, but the way you work in this industry is, in the end, still a political decision.

I think we also need to have a kind of clarity regarding who is behind these sources of funding or distribution and where that money comes from. In France, there is currently a debate about the Bolloré empire. And I don’t think we should be so naive as to claim that money has no color. There are certain artists who are very aware of this and choose whether or not to work with a particular funder.”

Beyond what Paris has offered her, Diana says the cultural background she received from Romania is part of who she is, and she looks back with melancholy at her childhood home in Iași. In the meantime, her parents have also moved to France, so visits back home have become rarer.

“I am, nevertheless, proud when I can say that I went to film school in Romania, and I tell everyone about it, despite everything I felt regarding misogyny. I feel that it remains a very important cultural and historical background, and it’s part of who I have become today as a person.

I get very nostalgic when I think about Iași, when I think about the house our family has had for four generations. I have a very intimate connection with that house, with that city, with the way I grew up there. At the same time, there is a kind of sadness; I realize that everything has changed enormously and that the city is becoming a victim of consumer society.

A lot of corruption is altering the real estate landscape, the architectural landscape, and human relationships in Romanian society. Everything somehow falls victim to a systemic corruption at all levels, and I have the impression that we, as individuals, still don’t have much power.

It feels like a sort of tragic destiny against which we cannot fully rebel, and it resembles the feeling I had as a student, in my own little world where I wanted to make films as a cinematographer.”

***

This material is part of the “France Week” series, a Cultura la dubă project supported by BNP Paribas.

The post Diana Vidrașcu, director of photography, director and film stock restoration specialist: As a woman, you have to fight twice as hard”. appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

He has been living for four years in the French part of the Basque Country, right on the Atlantic coast, where he mows the lawn in his garden, shops at the local market, and refines the screenplay that will eventually become “The Costume”, his first French language film funded by the Prada Foundation. He still carries his Moldavian accent and the humor that won over cinema lovers. On the streets of the luxury resort Biarritz, he drives his car with license plates from Suceava and sometimes stops at a secret beach to take a quick dip in the ocean.

In the film world, Corneliu Porumboiu has managed to build a distinct, recognizable artistic universe, even though he is also a prominent figure of the Romanian New Wave. Essentially, he started a revolution in his own way.

Two decades after the premiere of “12:08 East of Bucharest”, which won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, the film continues to pack theaters in various corners of the world as new generations discover the Romanian director.

The filmmaker explores cinematic genre conventions, driven by a desire to preserve his personal vision despite commercial pressures or industry expectations.

On the other hand, he admits that perfectionism has often held him back or made him abandon screenplays he spent years writing.

He returns to Vaslui from time to time to play soccer with his former high school teammates. From the beach in Biarritz, he tells us why he gave up soccer, but also how he ended up making films and never looking back.

In the end, he managed to make football infinite.

***

“I wanted to have a football career until I realized I wasn’t very good.”

To get to Corneliu Porumboiu, who is settled in a village near the small town of Saint Jean de Luz, we took the TGV from Paris and traveled for nearly five hours. He was waiting for us at the Biarritz train station and drove us toward the center of town. “There is a major rivalry between these two towns, they have their own version of Barlad and Vaslui,” Corneliu says with a laugh.

His wife, the visual artist and set designer Arantxa Etcheverria, with whom he has collaborated on his recent films, is of Basque origin, and they used to come here with their children for vacations to visit her grandparents. Around four years ago, they decided to move everyone to France to be closer to the French film industry. In the meantime, Corneliu has also become a French citizen.

“It was a project we had for a long time, a family project, we wanted to move here, I wanted to make a film in another language, and I thought the girls were old enough, one is in college, the other is starting high school now. So I said let us take this step.

In Romania, you reach a budget limit at some point, it is hard to do something different anymore. Even a budget like the one I had for The Whistlers was hard to get, because that was before COVID. Obviously, as a director, you want to work with better conditions, both financially and overall.

It is easier to be connected to people from the industry if you are here. Also, since the film takes place here, it was very important for me to live in this area.”

Corneliu Porumboiu’s story begins in 1975, in an apartment building in Vaslui. When he was born, his mother was a Romanian language teacher and his father, Adrian Porumboiu, a football player, was ending his playing career to start one as a referee. He would go on to become one of the most famous Romanian referees, with an international career, as well as an agricultural businessman and eventually the owner of the FC Vaslui football club.

Football was a constant presence in the life of Corneliu, who played professionally himself as a central midfielder. In fact, his earliest childhood memories are tied to football.

“I lived in two neighborhoods in Vaslui, in one until I was seven. Then we moved. I remember there was a military unit across the street and I used to play football with the guys from there. At one point, I wanted to make a career in football, until I realized I wasn’t very good, hahaha.

I was on the team at the School Sports Club – CSS in Vaslui. I was already at the math and physics high school, while my other teammates went to the sports high school. I had a more demanding schedule at school and it became hard with practices every day and games on the weekends. I would finish classes at two, have practice at three, finish at five, and by the time I showered it was getting late. I did not even have time to eat, because if I ate beforehand, I could not practice well.

And in the end I would return home and had to do my homework, and I had also started reading a lot during that time. (Editor note: his mother encouraged him to read). I also had an injury that kept coming back and I thought, man, this is not practical.

But I still love football very much today.

Do you still play from time to time?

Very rarely. The last time I played, in Vaslui, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve with my former teammates, I did not warm up, ended up with a torn ligament, and now I have to do physical therapy. It was also around zero degrees outside, and someone told me: man, warm up well! I said no, I will start slow with some passes, I won’t go hard, I mostly came to see the guys. Then I made a sudden move and bam.”

“A cousin took me to the Cinematheque. I liked it a lot and started going more and more often.”

As he was getting closer to his high school graduation exams, he wanted to become, in turn, an archaeologist, a sociologist, or to study geography. In the end, he took the entrance exam for the Academy of Economic Studies – ASE alongside some classmates from Vaslui, and moved to Bucharest.

Only then would he discover the fascinating world of film.

“A cousin took me to the Cinematheque once. I liked it a lot and started going more and more often. They had those months dedicated to a single director, a Fellini month, an Antonioni month, then Capra. The Cinematheque was very good, you could really build a culture for yourself.”

He was still a student at ASE when he decided to take the entrance exam for film school, but he failed in his first year. He finished his degree at ASE and then got in on his second attempt at the National University of Theatre and Film – UNATC. And that is how he started working on his student films.

A few years ago, director Radu Mihaileanu told us, also in an interview for the France Week series, how he saw the young Corneliu on his film set.

“When I filmed Train of Life in Vaslui, I was staying at the most prominent hotel in Vaslui, which belonged to a very wealthy man, Adrian Porumboiu, who came to see me at dinner and told me: <Excuse me, I also have a boy who would like to make movies. Can he come to the set tomorrow?>

The anecdote is fabulous. He came and, poor guy, stood a hundred meters behind the camera, very far away, he was so shy. And I told my French assistant: <He will never make cinema. He is standing to far away.>

When we met after he won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, I told Corneliu Porumboiu: I bet that you would never make movies. I am very happy that I was wrong.”

Corneliu now tells us his own perspective on that film set.

“It was a high angle shot, very complex, with a lot of preparation, with about two hundred extras and costumes, the train had to pass, and some people had to jump out of it. It was something super difficult, an incredible display of logistics. I was not used to anything like that. Even to this day, I have never shot a sequence of that kind.

Obviously, seeing the madness there, I told myself, why should I even get in the way? If I do not stand in the right spot, I might even end up in the frame of a reverse shot, hahaha.” (he laughs)

What was the first screenplay you wanted to turn into a feature film?

It was one that I never ended up making, though Igor Cobileanski later adapted and shot it.

But why didn’t you make it yourself?

Because I had worked on that screenplay for about two years. And it wasn’t working out for me, at a certain point it became mechanical. I had received funding for it from the National Film Center for my debut, and I even got a Cannes residency with it in Paris. But later on, I wrote “12:08 East of Bucharest”. And I never went back to the other one, it felt too technical to me.

After that, I told my dad: will you help me make this film? Because I couldn’t make it with money from the CNC, since I had given up on the debut project.

How was “12:08 East of Bucharest” born?

I saw a TV show where three people were talking about the revolution. I got angry because it was the same thing with the 12:08 timestamp, like, man, how can you talk like that? But I turned off the TV and the story stuck with me afterward, it was almost like a joke. Man, was there a revolution in Vaslui if people only went out after 12:08? And at one point I said: let me write this story. I wrote it very quickly.

Regarding the general atmosphere of the film, what still remains very strong in memory is the humor. Where does your humor come from?

“I do not know, I am actually very serious by nature. My wife says you would not even believe that I make these kinds of movies, hahaha. I am quite serious,” Corneliu says with a laugh.

Out of the entire process of working on a film, which part do you like the most?

Directing.

There are also projects that never ended up getting made.

And you didn’t make them because you lost faith in them?

Yes, at some point it feels like the story just doesn’t hold up anymore, you know? You work, you try things out, you make mistakes, maybe it is not right, not everything has to work out, and a lot of time passes from the moment you write to when you actually start filming.

But do you think you are a perfectionist by nature?

Yes. And over time I learned that it can also be a flaw.

Because you feel like it holds you back?

Yes, or sometimes you can end up with a kind of rigidity, both in the screenplay and in how you actually make it. For example, with ‘When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism’, a film that I still laugh at when I watch it, it is funny, at least to me, I rehearsed an enormous amount with the actors and on location.

There are many behind the scenes aspects, like rehearsing, but not rehearsing too much. I try to manage it so that everything doesn’t become rigid.

You said you do not like the writing part anymore, would you like to try making a film based on someone else’s screenplay?

Yes, I would, if possible, but I think I would still have to give it at least one pass myself. Especially with the dialogue, because I have my own style of dialogue, and that is where the humor comes from, it operates through the dialogue. For example, in ‘Metabolism’, it helped me to have what the actor says in with their reactions.

Because in cinema, when a character speaks, it is taken as an absolute truth. It is very hard to reestablish it otherwise. And that is something I like to play with, having a contrast between body language and what the person is saying. And when it comes to the dialogue, to keep the humor, my dialogues are very much like a game of ping pong.

Following his successful debut with “12:08 East of Bucharest”, Porumboiu went on to win the Un Certain Regard prize for “Police, Adjective” and the Un Certain Talent prize for “The Treasure”, while his film “When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism” was selected for the official competition at Locarno. His passion for soccer found its place in the documentary films “Infinite Football” and “The Second Game”, in which he and his father commentate on a 1988 Steaua vs. Dinamo derby match that was refereed by Adrian Porumboiu. He attended the Berlinale with both documentaries.

“The Whistlers”, filmed outside of Romania, marked his clear departure from the stylistic elements of the Romanian New Wave and also earned a selection in the official competition at Cannes.

“The Costume” – the first French language film directed by Corneliu Porumboiu

Now, Corneliu Porumboiu is polishing the screenplay for the film “The Costume”, which will be produced by Lumen. MK2, the company founded by Marin Karmitz, a Frenchman of Romanian origin, with whom Porumboiu also collaborated on his last film, “The Whistlers”, will co-produce alongside Cristian Mungiu’s company, Mobra Films, and Komplizen Film from Germany.

The project is also supported by funding from the Prada Foundation and will star a well-known French actor. Filming is expected to take place in the area where the director currently lives.

Looking back, he admits that the awards he won helped his career, but he does not consider them life changing, nor does he agree with making films solely for the purpose of getting selected by a major festival. In fact, he discourages young filmmakers from equating success with awards.

“In our industry, they say only your last film matters. So that is pretty much how it goes in cinema.

Is the success of a film also measured by its longevity? By the fact that it still packs theaters twenty years later?

Well, that is actually the ultimate test of a film. If it touches on something universal that remains relevant beyond the sociopolitical context of its time, I think that is the biggest achievement. Besides, when you make a film, you place yourself within a certain cinematic tradition; in the end, we are all influenced by films we have seen before.

And if you somehow manage to add something new, to not just repeat things, that is another major goal. You are not just telling a story, because you can do that in literature too. It is how you tell it that matters.

On the other hand, there is also an overvaluation of novelty. Wow, it is new, so it must be good. There is a flip side to that too.”

I also receive films from young directors from time to time, I talk with them, I sometimes watch rough cuts, and they are good. But they need time.

Also, if you make a film, it is not healthy at all to think only about festivals, because if you are not selected, it creates a kind of frustration and misunderstanding.

What should an honest approach in cinema be for? To answer the director’s inner searches, for the audience, or for festivals?

I think it depends on where you are in your life. For example, right now, I am very interested in having the film open up to the audience somehow. It is very difficult to distribute a Romanian film. It is true that a major festival helps you, an award helps you, and I pretty much know what kind of numbers I got with each film. But in the end, Western cinema, even French cinema, is built around stars. So the star brings you funding, and then they bring the audience into the theater.

In Romania, for example, people go to the theater because Marius Manole is on the poster. There is a star system, you know?”

Corneliu now lives in a house with a garden near the Atlantic Ocean, on the border between France and Spain. “I go to Spain to buy my cigarettes because they are much cheaper,” he confesses with a laugh. He goes to the local cinema to watch movies and to the market to buy fresh groceries.

Do you cook?

Yes, but I am not some major talent. The cool thing here is that even if you are not particularly good at cooking, the food still turns out very tasty because everything is locally produced. The beef has flavor, and so do the vegetables, the fish, and the seafood. Even at the supermarket, everything consists of fresh local products.

How else has your life changed since you moved here?

I work, and I am much more focused on my work, that is clear. And besides that, it is very pleasant here, as you can see. I know the area very well; I have been coming here every summer for twenty years now. My wife is Basque, her family is here, and I know the people.

How did you meet your wife?

I think it was around 98 or 99, she was working in Romania. She studied set and costume design in Strasbourg and was working with the theater in Iasi. We met through an actress friend. After that, we kept a long distance relationship going for a while.

Are your daughters interested in film or acting?

No, and I did not force them, although they have a good eye for art—but that is something you have to cultivate over time. Besides, they do not want to do this. They see how hard we struggle, hahaha… and they say, ‘no thanks!’ (laughs)

But why is it so agonizing to make a movie?

I do not find it agonizing because I love it, but from the outside, if they see someone just sitting and writing all the time: <what are you doing, dad? Writing. How’s that project of yours going? When are you going to make it?>(laughs) My girls also make fun of me: <When are you going to make your film?>

Yeah, what can I say, it has taken a long time.

How do you explain to the people reading this article why it takes so long to make a movie?

It also depends on everyone’s individual pace and the timing, because you can have periods that move faster. It depends on the project and the budget. With this project I am working on now, since it requires a larger budget, it took some time to secure the money. Foreign producers look at the box office: let’s see, how much did your last film make.

What is your opinion on shooting a movie with a phone?

Yes, you can do it, but on the other hand, where do you distribute it? For a movie theater, it needs to be a certain type of product. It is nice to say, yeah man, I am making it with a phone, but where do people actually watch that phone-shot film?

In the end, the spectator makes an effort to get to the theater. They pay for a ticket, they take time out of their day, and the movie theater is somewhat conditioned by a certain type of spectacular element.

But for those who still cannot manage to raise the necessary budget, could it be a solution?

Sure, rather than not working at all, it is important to just make it that way. Just don’t have high expectations. Not everyone is well-known like Radu Jude; he already has his own established audience, he has been doing this for a long time, he had good films before this, he shoots with a phone, but he is actually working with the principles of a 35mm or 16mm camera. That is a different thing.

You were telling me at one point that you taught at UNATC, but you quit because the students were not serious and would not show up to class. Would you ever want to teach again?

That was at one point, but the truth is it was very demanding. I was losing a lot of time for my own projects. I had two days a week of six-hour classes. After that, they would send me screenplays, I would write notes, so that took up another day. And they would also poke fun at me because I was an assistant; at one point I would call them out, ask them what they did with the screenplay, tell them they had that specific problem to solve, and then they would make fun of me: ‘Oh, Mr. Laurentiu Damian approved it just the way it was.’

Corneliu Porumboiu was celebrated this year at TIFF, where a retrospective of his films was the highlight of the edition. “A retrospective feels a bit like… (laughs) I say I still want to make a few more movies, my career doesn’t end here, hahaha.”

Whenever he gets the chance, he participates in workshops with students and tries to stay connected to future generations of Romanian directors. However, he is left with the regret that despite the international success of Romanian filmmakers, movie theaters in our country have disappeared, one by one.

“Even if we invest in theaters from now on, my opinion is that it is quite late because that type of consumption no longer exists. I have friends who have lost the habit; they prefer to go to the theater, for example. So it is very difficult to bring back that kind of cinema consumption. We have actually lost two or three generations.

And then came the mall generation, but if you go to the mall, you lose your mind. For this kind of auteur cinema, even if you start rebuilding the theaters, I think there is a much greater need for investment in film culture. It needs to come as a package deal with something more. Not just having the screen.”

***

This article is part of the”French week” series, a project by Cultura la Dubă, supported by BNP Paribas

The post Corneliu Porumboiu, a man from Vaslui in Basque Country: “When will you make your next film?” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

While the Romanian language is increasingly less mastered in vulnerable environments with high dropout rates, and on the other hand, Gen Z youth feel they can express themselves better in English than in Romanian, Sylvain Audet-Găinar’s story is the exact opposite, one of fascination for the Romanian language.

The Frenchman Sylvain Audet loved his wife and her family from Romania so much that, completely of his own free will, he thought it only natural to take the name Găinar, knowing full well the meaning of the word.

A teacher of French as a foreign language, Sylvain lived in Romania for a few years and fell in love with our language. He started writing about Romanian expressions and proverbs and recording clips for social media. He quickly and unexpectedly gained popularity among both Romanians and the French.

“My goal was that when we had a child, I would be able to understand my wife’s language when she spoke to our kid. It was incredibly important to me that there wouldn’t be a disconnect, an imbalance, or even a cultural hierarchy,” the author explains.

Today, their son speaks both French and Romanian equally, and Sylvain Audet-Găinar is working on a Romanian language textbook for French speakers. We met him in Paris, and he told us his story, with the entire conversation taking place exclusively in Romanian.

***

Sylvain was born in a rural area near Lyon. He went to high school in the city, which would change his personal life and map out his path toward a career in linguistics.

“My high school was partnered with a school in Târgu Mureș. So, when I was in the tenth grade, they suggested I become pen pals with someone from Târgu Mureș. For a few years already, I had been very drawn to this country because when I was 9, I watched the 1989 Revolution on TV and it shocked me. Those images really stuck with me, everything seemed so cruel, so strange. I didn’t understand, like, is this what a real revolution looks like? It wasn’t idealized like what we learned about revolutions in school.

So, when I was in the 10th grade and they offered me the chance to write to someone there, I gladly accepted. I received the address of a girl named Maria Găinar. Today, she is my wife.”

“We started writing letters to each other in French, because I didn’t know a single word of Romanian back then. I didn’t even know how to pronounce the name of the city. After two years of corresponding, we were supposed to actually meet, the Romanian students were going to visit us, and we were going to go there. But the exchange fell through because we were the only two still writing to each other. The others weren’t.

So I waited a year, started university, and saved up money to pay for a plane ticket to finally see her.

Did you send photos to each other? Did you know what she looked like?

Yes, but back then, photos were very rare and sometimes older. It took time to get a picture taken, or it would get lost. I think in the photo she sent me, she was a few years younger than she was when we actually met.

It wasn’t like the days of WhatsApp, where you send a picture in a second. And when I went, I stayed for a month.

At her place?

Yes, her parents agreed to it. She invited me to come over because of the Solar Eclipse. And that’s pretty much how I entered the Romanian world.

And you fell in love with Maria, basically.

Exactly. I genuinely fell in love with her, but also with her language—the way it sounds, the way it’s hard to quite catch. It feels like such a playful language that it makes you want to learn it, just to reach a level where you can have fun with it too,” Sylvain tells us with a smile on his face at a café in Paris.

Back then, he was a Literature student studying French and comparative literature. To be closer to Maria, he signed up for an Erasmus year at the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest. Later, she got a scholarship in Strasbourg, and they both moved to France.

“I finished my studies there, and she did her PhD there. And we started moving back and forth between the two countries. I worked for the French Embassy in Romania, then in Sibiu, and in Cluj. At some point, I got a position in Bucharest, and our child was born in Bucharest.

I became a French teacher for foreigners. That’s what I did for many years. I was a French lecturer at the ‘Lucian Blaga’ University in Sibiu, but I also taught at the kindergarten of the French High School in Bucharest. I really loved it; I worked there for four years and it was a lot of fun. I liked this job because I worked with very different profiles, with very young children who couldn’t read yet, so I had to come up with very creative games and activities.

And I also worked with adults, sometimes with very little education, even illiterate—that was in Brussels.”

Was Maria your Romanian teacher, or were you self-taught?

“I was partly self-taught, but she also helped me a lot. Maria used to read to me when I was a beginner. I would ask her to read to me in Romanian. She read me the entire Harry Potter series, for example. I learned a ton of words. Though, mind you, not all of them are very easy to use in everyday speech. ‘Cauldron’ (ceaun), for instance, I haven’t really used since then, hahaha. Or ‘owl’ (bufniță).”

When we met Sylvain in Paris, he and his family had just returned from a funeral in Romania. Half-joking, half-serious, he knows exactly what an “alms” means.

He is incredibly attached to our country and his family here, and his interest in the Romanian language naturally evolved toward writing and translation.

“I started translating from Romanian into French, but I got a bit tired of translating other people’s books and figured I’d be better off writing my own books exactly the way I wanted. That’s how I started writing. I was living in Bucharest at the time, and my wife was pregnant. We had just found out we were having a boy. I was at an antique bookstore and stumbled upon a small, anonymous photo.

It moved me deeply to see a picture of a 4 or 5 year old boy whom I knew nothing about, whose life story no one was telling. I was thinking about our own boy and decided I wanted to tell him the history of Romania, and try to give that child in the photo a story of his own.

That’s how I started writing a detective novel. It felt like the most suitable format, given the mystery of it all. And I wanted it to be funny too, because that’s just my personality.

I started reading those chapters out loud, but it was actually a family novel. I would read a chapter every time we went for an ultrasound checkup. Then I started making such good progress that I realized it was becoming a real book, and I actually ended up writing a trilogy.”

The three novels written by Sylvain Audet-Găinar, inspired by the photo found in the antique bookstore, have been translated into Romanian: Tămbălău la București (Ruckus in Bucharest), Țap ispășitor (Scapegoat), and Balamuc la București (Madhouse in Bucharest).

His most recent book, launched right at the Romanian booth at the Paris Book Fair, is a volume about 80 Romanian words, explained in Sylvain’s signature style – “80 mots de Roumanie.”

“The format of this book is very strict. It is a series of 10 volumes, and Romania is the 10th one. You have to choose 80 words from a language, and each word gets a text of 2,500 characters maximum. So it’s a huge stylistic constraint. The publisher told me to make it more about myself. And I had a lot of stories to tell.

For example, I talk about it in the first chapter: when I was 19, I went to Bucharest, transitioning from being a teenager to a man. And I used to go get a shave because I liked being surrounded by Romanian men, to understand culturally how the Romanian way of being a man works.

And from there, I start explaining from my point of view what it means to be a man in Romania. So each word is actually just a pretext.”

Sylvain’s connection to Romania spans over 25 years now. It began in a communist-era apartment in Târgu Mureș and now encompasses a rich linguistic universe, a Romanian-French son, and a community of over 20,000 people who follow the funny clips the author posts on Instagram.

“What were the first things that amazed you about Romania?

The carpets, for example. I found it amazing.

The ones on the walls or on the floor?

Hahaha. On the floor. Then the sheer curtains. The smell in the building’s stairwell. The sound of cars when they put it in reverse. How could I, a country boy from France, look at a communist apartment block in Romania? I talk about this in the book. And actually, the book isn’t just about me. That’s what I found very interesting as a writer, that I was like a vector for an analysis. I try to bring a fair, honest look at Romanians, at Romania, something balanced.”

“How did your family and close friends react to you falling in love with Romania back when you were 19 or 20?

My folks worried when I left for Bucharest for a whole year. It was one thing to go for a month to see your pen pal, and another to be gone for a year. I couldn’t afford to come home often back then, and phone calls were expensive. I would call once every two weeks, and other than that, we wrote letters, I actually kept them.

I have really great parents; they didn’t project their fear onto me. They only told me after I got back: ‘Wow, we’re so glad you’re back, because we were actually scared for a year.’ Either way, I had parents who let me grow up pretty free. They didn’t restrict me too much. That’s the advantage of living in the countryside. You have space, go figure it out. That was pretty much their philosophy on life. And I’m grateful they didn’t box me into a specific way of looking at things. That was my luck. I was also lucky that I met my wife at 19 and that we were actually able to grow up together. We became adults together.”

“Did Romanian literature help you get closer to the Romanian language?

Yes, I read Romanian literature too. At the beginning, I was actually quite ambitious. My first book was Enigma Otiliei (Otilia’s Enigma). I don’t know why, but I found the title very catchy. I regretted my choice after 20 pages, but I pushed through to the end and ended up loving it. I think I didn’t understand 50% of the book, but I loved the atmosphere.

Then I started reading contemporary literature. Lately, I really like Lavinia Braniște. She is super, super talented, and I had the honor of translating her book Camping into French, it’s coming out in September.

And right now, I read a lot of children’s books for our son. We laugh out loud together.

When I look back at the beginning, I know I started writing literature so that my son would have reference books and learn about his culture and history for pleasure. Now he is very proud that he was born in Bucharest, and all my fiction books have the word ‘Bucharest’ on them. It was incredibly important, symbolically, for me, so that it would be something symbolic for him too.”

“But slowly, surely, I realized that what I was saying was also very useful for others. I started making the videos just to entertain myself. Then I realized a whole movement had started. People actually began sharing them with friends and colleagues. Some French people would tell me that, for example, on Monday mornings over coffee, they watch Sylvain’s video to teach their colleagues about the Romanian language. French people in mixed couples.

Or that the videos are important for some Romanian children living in France who hadn’t learned Romanian because they felt it was just an extra, useless language.

Now, every time I meet Romanians in the diaspora, I find out that these videos have, for instance, made kids actually want to speak, to learn strange and funny expressions. And now I feel a sense of responsibility; every time I post a video, I know people will watch closely and feel encouraged. People leave very long comments giving me all kinds of ideas or expressions I’ve never heard of in my life. I read them eagerly, linguistically and humanly speaking, it really feeds me intellectually.”

Sylvain confesses that he does, however, have one regret regarding the Romanian language. From one year to the next, he notices that people’s vocabulary is becoming increasingly limited, whether due to social media consumption or because they don’t read as much as before. In fact, the decline in reading interest is felt even in France, the heart of European culture.

“I’ve been able to observe the way people’s lexicon, their vocabulary, has shrunk. At one point I thought, okay, maybe it’s because I master the language well enough now and I’m just getting bored. Or people have become boring because they don’t use more interesting words anymore.

When I hear someone with a rich vocabulary, I feel so happy, so nourished to hear those rarer words; I feel like they’re giving me a gift. It’s obvious that people don’t read anymore.

I belong to a writers’ union created by Balzac in the 19th century to protect authors’ rights against publishers. And every year we receive a report on the status of writers or readers. Right now, 90% of French readers are women. And there are sociological explanations for this. Reading is not encouraged among men at all. It doesn’t look good to be a man who reads. If you read, you’re already considered too feminine or something like that. And this has long-term consequences for boys. If a boy doesn’t see his father reading, he tends to distance himself from books too.”

Sylvain Audet-Găinar now teaches at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris, where 100 languages are studied, including Romanian. He works with first-year students, teaching them courses in general linguistics and anthropology. In parallel, he has written the first chapters of his Romanian textbook for French speakers and is working on a new fiction book.

He was recently in Bucharest for the launch of his book about Romanian words. In the long run, he doesn’t know if his family will stay settled in France or in Romania, but he is determined to keep developing other people’s interest in the Romanian language.

“Romania is a part of me. I don’t know, I feel at home. When I go there, I’m just like the Romanians, very critical of what’s happening there, I follow the news from there, I just don’t have citizenship to be able to vote. Maybe I’ll get it, who knows. I’ve never really thought about it. I feel like it would be a beautiful symbol. I don’t know how much I actually feel Romanian. In a way, I think I became one without meaning to. It happened naturally, to the point where it’s just a part of me.”

This article is part of the”French week” series, a project by Cultura la Dubă, supported by BNP Paribas

The post The story of Sylvain Audet-Găinar, the Frenchman in love with the Romanian language: “It’s such a playful language that it makes you want to learn it just so you can have fun with it too.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

Awarded at Cannes, the European Film Academy Awards, and nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Sentimental Value), Renate Reinsve is currently one of the most acclaimed actresses in the world.

We met her in Norway, her homeland, during the filming of  Fjord, Cristian Mungiu’s first film shot abroad, with a mixed crew, made up of various nationalities. Renate plays Lisbet Gheorghiu, the wife of Mihai Gheorghiu, portrayed by Sebastian Stan.

Renate was deeply convinced by Mungiu’s screenplay, inspired by the real case of the Bodnariu family, whose children were taken by Norway’s child protection services after the parents were accused of child abuse.

In this, her only interview given so far to the Romanian press, Renate talks to Cultura la dubă about her experience working with Cristian Mungiu, and about interacting with the Romanian crew — “Honestly, I think Romanians are among the kindest people I have ever met. They are so nice, even if they argue a lot on set, haha,” Renate says with a smile.

Filming took place in the heart of a Norwegian fjord, in the remote mountains, where the actress recounts strange experiences, staying in a luxury hotel said to be haunted. “I think ghosts are something natural because this is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to, and if I were a ghost, I wouldn’t return to a city. I would come here.”

Fjord will have its world premiere on May 18 in the official competition of the Cannes Film Festival and is one of the most anticipated films of this edition.

—

Renate, first of all, tell us, please, how did you meet Cristian Mungiu?

Well, I first heard about this project from a production company I had worked with many times before, called Eye Eye Pictures from Norway. They produced The Worst Person in the World, Sentimental Value, and Armand, in which I acted. Cristian had seen The Worst Person in the World, Armand, and the film I made with Sebastian Stan, A Different Man. I knew he was very inspired by this story from Norway.

He wanted to meet me in the production company office to talk about the role. I read the script, and I think I had to stop reading four times because I was so moved — it’s so painful what these characters went through! And the way Cristian writes probably relates to his past as a journalist.

I think his greatest talent is seeking objectivity within subjectivity. Of course, there is a very emotional story, but his way of always trying to remain faithful to the story’s objectivity and then making it as nuanced as possible is truly impressive.

So, when I read the script, I connected a lot with the entire story, but especially with the character Lisbet. There was actually another role in the script named Mia, which might have suited me better. Lisbet’s role is very atypical—I had never done anything like this before, but still felt a strong connection to her. I didn’t know how to interpret her.

But I think Lisbet came to life during filming because of the script, Cristian’s working method, and the way I work. I didn’t really decide anything. And Cristian doesn’t like to talk about the character’s intentions or judge the characters.

It feels like a different way of working, really.  So I was very surprised by what this character became.

I still haven’t seen the film. But it feels like, maybe for the first time, I don’t really have control over her. She reveals herself in a different voice. She looks very different. She behaves very differently. But I really love her. I really love her. This was actually my second favorite shoot.

What was the first one?

The first was The Worst Person in the World. It will always be at the top of my list. That place was so special, and it was my first lead role in a film, which was magical!

How did you find Cristian Mungiu’s working style on set, with many takes and complex mise-en-scenes?

Yes, it’s very complex. It was a shock for me because, unfortunately, due to scheduling, I started with the most difficult scenes for my character. I hadn’t learned this method yet, so it was a shock. I wish I had more time to understand his method, because you can’t intellectually understand it, you have to truly feel it, learn it bit by bit, and notice subtle signs in his process to know exactly what to do.

It’s impossible for an actor to maintain the character’s truthfulness through so many takes. His way of working is poetic, using physicality on stage, in the mise-en-scène. And he’s skilled in how he does that. I have great respect for how he does it and tries to find the best way.

It takes time to learn to be honest within the framework he builds—not the physical frame, but the structure in which he makes his films.

Were you familiar with some of his films or other Romanian directors’ works before collaborating?

I’ve seen Beyond the Hills, which is, of course, a masterpiece. I haven’t seen them all, but now I’m obviously familiar with his work. It’s very impressive and moving to have the chance to talk with him, understand his filmmaking values, and I’ve learned so much!

I think it will affect my work going forward, absolutely, because the standard is higher now—a very high standard.

You also must trust the story because in this working style, you don’t help the audience or show something specific or help Cristian. It’s truly an attempt to be honest with the situation.

I really like working with strong directors who know exactly what they want. It’s easier to navigate as an actor in that context. I really enjoy working in Europe.

How was working with the other Romanians on the team?

It was amazing. I feel everyone is very connected to Cristian’s vision. Honestly, I think Romanians are some of the kindest people I’ve met. They are so sweet, even if they argue a lot on set, haha. Anyway, I think actors are very protected from conflicts, so I don’t know everything, but I really feel Romanians have big hearts.

Do you think the tone and atmosphere on set come from the director’s manner?

Definitely. Everyone here is influenced by Cristian’s way of being—so generous, kind, welcoming. He truly loves films, truly loves the people on set, and respects them, and the energy he brings influences how we all are together.

We stay together in this special place, see each other all the time, it’s like a camp.

Speaking of this place, did you know it before? Have you traveled here?

No, no, no. Even people who travel a lot in Norway, who I talked to, had never heard of this place. It was impressive for me to discover it too.

But were you aware of the Romanian family’s story, which inspired the film, from Norwegian media? In Romania, it was heavily covered, with street protests.

I’ve heard about it, yes. Some people here have heard of the case, but I wasn’t familiar with the news. Of course, I’ve heard stories about child social services, both the good and the bad. I think the way Cristian uses this story to talk about something more universal draws a line between existential things happening within each of us and how society perceives them. I believe he uses this story to say even more about life and coexistence.

It also highlights how hard it is to truly understand another culture.

We did a lot of research together. Cristian invited us to Romania. I really tried to understand the history that marked Romania, especially Bucharest, where we went.

I tried to get to know these people and learn the language. But even when you try hard and intensely, there will always be parts you will never understand. That’s how conflicts arise in our society.

I think this film will also offer the chance to show how difficult it is to understand our differences, and if you can look at someone kindly, even if they are unknown or scary, you’ll find a better resolution to conflict. It makes you aware of how many prejudices people have—and yourself. It’s so important to be aware of these things.

We witnessed a very sweet scene at the end of a filming day when you and some fellow actresses gave Cristian a gift. He seemed touched. What bird did that sculpture represent and what was the message behind the gift?

It relates to the mystery of this place where we filmed because many of us had experiences here with possible ghosts and strange experiences with birds.

It’s hard to explain. When Cristian first came here, he had his first encounter with this bird, which also represented the first Norwegian word he learned, “skarv,” the name of the bird.

So, we gave him that gift so he could have it with him, take it home, and hang it on his wall.

What about the ghosts here? Are these legends, jokes, or do you really believe in their existence?

I think they are natural because this is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to, and if I were a ghost, I wouldn’t return to a city. I’d come here. If I die, I’d come here. So, I think it’s natural there are many ghosts here. Hahaha.

There are myths and stories about this hotel and who haunts it. Some people claim they’ve actually seen them, even though I don’t believe in that stuff. Still, something happened to me here that I can’t explain.

When things happen, you try to find a logical reason. But things happened here that you can’t explain rationally. I think this whole story contributes to the magical experience of filming.

Your unexplainable experience was it pleasant or scary?

A bit scary, but I don’t think ghosts want to be nasty. I think they are a little cheeky but nice. (she laughs)

***

The post INTERVIEW Renate Reinsve: “Working with Cristian Mungiu will affect my future work because the standard is now higher, very high.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

“This is your responsibility – to look at all the parts of yourself, even the ones you don’t like, the questions you’re afraid of, to see who you are, how you were made, and then ask yourself: okay, now what do you want to do with that?”

Departure. For an 8-year-old child, departure can be a concept absorbed far too early, especially when it leads into the unknown. It becomes, however, bearable when accompanied by a mother determined to offer a new life.

Departure is deeply rooted in Sebastian Stan’s life story. He left Constanța as a child, leaving behind his beloved grandparents and his friends from the apartment building stairwell. He arrived with his mother in Austria, then in America, in New York. And later, his acting career would also involve countless other departures.

But today we won’t talk about leaving – we’ll talk about returning.

With an extraordinary ability to transform, choosing vastly different scripts, Sebastian Stan is now one of the most acclaimed actors in Hollywood, a Golden Globe winner and an Academy Award nominee. He holds dual citizenship – American and Romanian.

And in just a few weeks, he will be seen for the first time in a Romanian film, Fjord, directed by Cristian Mungiu – exactly where any cinema artist belongs: at the Cannes Film Festival, in the official competition.

To get close to a celebrity like Sebastian Stan, you would normally have to pass through an army of agents, managers, publicists, or quite literally, security personnel.

On the Fjord set in Norway, however, things were different. For over a month, Stan set aside his invisible superstar cloak and integrated himself into the various layers of the film crew, made up of Romanians, Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns.

Typically, such a celebrity gives interviews rarely and only to major, internationally known publications.

The fact that Sebastian Stan chose to give his first interview in Romania after his Oscar nomination to a small publication like Cultura la dubăsays much more about him than about us. It is just one of the ways in which he uses his notoriety in service of others – to support causes he believes in, causes that otherwise do not receive much attention. With the same reasoning, he supported, as a producer and financier, the debut feature film of a Romanian director – A River’s Gaze, by Andreea Borțun.

The conversation with Sebastian Stan flowed as naturally as possible and touched on personal subjects that help us discover him beyond his acting career. From the search of a child suddenly awakened in a completely different world, to the 42-year-old adult trying to find his true identity and his role on earth. All of this, in the context of the painful loss of his father – “I only spoke Romanian with my father, which created a very special intimacy between us, like an invisible thread that belonged only to us.”

What role does film play in all of this? It is the art form through which Stan can bring his most authentic contribution to a world torn by conflict. And it is also part of his own personal search.

The interview took place in Norway, in April 2025, during a filming break. Sebastian chose to speak in Romanian, though at times some ideas were expressed in English.The material also features the first images of Sebastian Stan on the Fjord film set, captured by photographer Adi Bulboacă for Cultura la dubă.

***

“Sebastian, we’re in Norway, close to the end of filming on Fjord. First of all, how are you, how do you feel here?

I can’t even believe we only have two weeks left and we’re done. It’s a bit strange here, you’re in a different state. After so much time spent here, in isolation, among these wild mountains, it’s like you no longer know whether the thoughts that pass through your mind truly belong to you or to the character.

Probably this very austerity of the landscape was perfect for me, it helped me disconnect from anything else and sink into a completely different world, one that feels almost timeless.

Being in this location helped us a lot to understand what life would be like here for this family in the film, what each character’s world would look like. It really is a space where the boundaries between you and the role gradually blur, which is wonderful, right?

Before I left, I didn’t really have time to think about what it would be like here from an objective perspective, being a totally new experience, after all, it’s my first film with a crew made up of so many Romanians.

What made you accept this project and work with Cristian Mungiu?

I’ve wanted for a long time to collaborate with Cristian. If I look at the last few years, I can say I’ve become more and more dependent on directors and on stories that allow me to go into the character’s depth.

I like to discover in myself and in the character something unexpected, maybe even frightening, that kind of fear that pushes you to dig deeper.
That inner fear, of not being fully prepared or of failing in front of a new nuance, of a character foreign to me, is what I’m looking for, I think it’s what makes me grow as an actor.

I have admired Cristian since I saw his first film. We met a few years ago and kept trying to find a project to work on together. In the end, we found this one and I’m grateful it came together.

You have lived most of your life outside Romania and you’ve already had extraordinary film projects in your career. How can you explain this desire of yours, to have not only a personal connection to the country where you were born, but also a professional, artistic one? How and when did this desire or need appear and what lies, in its depth?

Romania is the place where I was born and where part of what I am today was formed. And yes, for a long time I wanted to get involved in a Romanian cinematic project.

My first project with the Romanian film industry isn’t this one, Fjord, but the film directed by Andreea Borțun, “Malul Vânăt” (A River’s Gaze), where I got involved as a producer and financier. It made me very happy that I had this opportunity to be part of, to support a project by a young director, at the beginning of her journey, on her first feature film.

I think it’s very important, if we can, to support such new voices. Often great careers are born from these first steps. Think of Martin Scorsese, who debuted with Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) thanks to the support of producer Roger Corman, opening the road toward masterpieces like Taxi Driver later. I won’t say that my support was just as decisive, just as important, but I tried to be there for her in this effort as much as I could.

My roots are there, even if I left at only 8, and my first return was only at 21. That long break made the return not just physical, but much more revealing, I could even call it spiritual.

I needed to mature, to gather experiences and, most of all, to cultivate my curiosity and my desire to better understand where I come from. This rediscovery influenced me a lot from the start of my career, realizing that my place of origin and the traits that set me apart are, in fact, parts that define me and support me in life – after a large part of childhood I only wanted to fit in and be like the others.

Being different societies I had to adapt to (n.r. Austria, USA), it’s probably natural to want to belong.

With age, you realize that uniqueness doesn’t come from what you share with others, but precisely from those qualities and experiences that shape your own identity and challenge you to build a path of your own. Our differences and particularities are, in the end, what give us an original perspective on the world and allow us to live detached from norms, in accord with who we truly are.
This matters enormously, especially in the film industry, where, as an actor, everything starts from how you find your voice.

I think success also depends on the power to express yourself honestly, which often comes from your own roots, feelings, and life experiences. That is exactly what stands behind the ability to understand the depth of characters and stories I was talking about earlier, but also of the people you work with, each with their unique history. That richness makes the performance alive, relevant.

These thoughts have always followed me and made me want more and more to return to the place I left, a place that appears to me in some bizarre memories from the Revolution of 1989, but especially in those with my grandparents, family, friends from back then, with how “the grown-ups” related to each other and to the social and political situation of those times.

All of that took shape around 2003, when I met a Romanian woman, Alexandra Tînjală, who later became my friend.

I was in England with my acting classmates from America, from Rutgers – where I was going to college. She was friends with someone in my class and that friend said: hey, you’re Romanian, she’s Romanian, talk. I, until then, had no contact in Romania anymore. I hadn’t kept in touch with the kids I played with in childhood. My grandparents, poor souls, had died. I had nobody anymore. We were all gone.

And because of Alexandra I began to rediscover Romania, Romanian cinema, Romanian directors. She introduced me to the Romanian new wave – Cristi Puiu, Porumboiu, Mungiu, then to Radu Jude’s films and other Romanian directors. She sent me films: “The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu”, “4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days”, “12:08 East of Bucharest” – which remains one of my favorite films, and many others.

I remember that around 2008 she brought me a DVD with Cristian’s film “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”, which she had gotten his autograph on. I’m really curious if I can still find it at home. That would be something!

Then I started to get involved in Alexandra’s volunteer program, Our Big Day Out, as a volunteer, which targets children in placement institutions and disadvantaged people. Alexandra is also a volunteer of the NGO The Alex Fund, founded by Leslie Hawke (n.r. Ethan Hawke’s mother).

They, this NGO, The Alex Fund, had an event at Lincoln Center, in New York – the screening of Cristian Mungiu’s film, Graduation. And Alexandra invited me to this screening, a perfect occasion to meet Cristian Mungiu, especially since I lived in New York.

So I took my mom with me, and at this event I met Cristian for the first time. I don’t think he knew anything about me then. It was happening around 2016, I think.

How did your relationship develop after that moment? Did you keep in touch?

Until 2018 I didn’t hear anything from him, but in 2018 Alexandra suggested that he invite me to the American Independent Film Festival, in Bucharest. There I was invited with the film “I, Tonya”, in which I had just acted. In that same week I also met Corneliu Porumboiu, whose fan I already was for a good few years. And only from then on can I say I kept in touch more often both with Cristian and with Corneliu.

You said earlier that you had several attempts to work together, but only now you matched. Do you feel this collaboration with a Romanian director came at exactly the right moment in your career?

Yes, now, after more than 20-something years in this business (it’s very interesting to hear myself saying that), I realized much more that, surprisingly, you can’t control everything, no matter how much you want to.

You always want to work with certain directors, to get specific roles, but for me all the important films, from “The Apprentice” and “I, Tonya”, “A different man” and now, “Fjord”, came exactly when I wasn’t expecting it.

It was as if I let myself be carried by the wave, as if I raised my hands in the air and said: you know what? If it’s meant to be, it’s going to happen, if not, not. And right then, letting things flow naturally, everything came together.

And I feel extremely lucky that ‘Fjord’ came together. We were talking about it back in the summer of 2024 and I still wasn’t sure if we would do it in December or January, but in the end, here we are, it happened now, in spring. And yes, it feels like it was meant to be that way.

I had also talked with Cristian about R.M.N. We tried then too to see if that film could suit me, but we didn’t synchronize.

And I think, in the end, Fjord is much more suitable for us.

What is it like to work with him? Did you get used quickly to his style on set, with long takes, with many takes?

It’s fascinating to work with a director who has such a personal and meticulous style. What I like most in this job is that every director comes with their own methods.

It’s somehow a moment that never stops exciting me. As an actor you have to always be open to absorb something new from each project – what worked in one film doesn’t necessarily mean it will work in the next.

Also, I don’t like to play the same thing all the time, it becomes boring.

This very instability makes a creative career feel alive. Somehow it forces you to reinvent yourself constantly, to discover all kinds of unsuspected resources in you, especially with a director who reconstructs reality down to the millimeter. I admit (laughs), I need someone to guide me. I think trust in directors is crucial.

Since I saw his first films I noticed his unmistakable style: each scene is kept as a long sequence, sometimes 20 minutes, and sometimes with a hundred people involved. And you watch those sequences and you feel like you’re watching a documentary – the actors don’t seem to act a role, they seem to live the story. I think that’s how the situation becomes very real, believable.

But I didn’t know how much he works on what we see, how attentive he is to every detail.

For example, he worries down to the millimeter how a child sits in a corner or how a flag flutters, everything is thought through meticulously to create impeccable visual authenticity.

After seeing all these things, I look at him now more as a complex artist, almost like a painter. You can stop his films on any frame and look at it like a work of art. And I don’t think that’s accidental. He has an extraordinary eye for detail, which gives his films a rare aesthetic level. It seems to me it’s very difficult to achieve something like that and that’s why it amazes me, I keep asking myself “how did he manage to think up this whole universe?”

For me, all these things were very motivating and pushed me daily to want to rise to the level of the universe he creates in his films.

The big difference between American films and European ones is that in many American films you often feel you’re being told how to feel, like someone is spoon-feeding you. Whereas in European films, you’re shown a situation, and you, as a viewer, are the one who draws conclusions, you decide how to feel, how to interpret the characters and the story.

It’s a much more creative and artistic approach and, in my view, that’s the impact film should have on the public. That’s life, after all, there isn’t only black or white, nobody is only good or only bad, we all try every day to live and make peace with our decisions, aware that we are subject to mistakes and nobody is perfect.

Coming back to working with Cristian, shooting a sequence 20–30 times is a huge challenge, something happens. It’s also a very heavy subject, it contains some very emotional scenes. To try to hold those emotions, as an actor, for that long time, every time, 20–30 times, is not easy at all.

You can feel you entered that state perfectly at take five, but maybe the other actors didn’t hit it. Everything has to be synchronized impeccably.

In a way, this style of filming resembles staging a theater play: you do daily rehearsals, you have shows a few times a week, you have to keep the rhythm and intensity, but still find new nuances in the same structure, even if you repeat the same text or scene.

It’s fascinating to go again and again toward that emotional state trying to improve it each time, not to repeat it, but to outdo yourself.

For this role, you needed to radically change your look. How did you reach an agreement about that? Was it hard for you to do?

I don’t think it was hard, especially after the experiences with the series Pam & Tommy, where I lost over 9 kilograms, or for the role in The Apprentice, where I gained about the same.

I think adapting the look helps enormously and brings authenticity to the character. Not only in what the public sees, but in how I relate, as an actor, to the character: you behave differently, you move differently, mannerisms change, certain instincts seem to adapt automatically. The closer you are to the character’s physicality, the closer you get to him.

I don’t see changing the look as something hard, but rather necessary if the character demands it. If you go to work knowing exactly how it will be, you have nowhere to move forward, and in the long run you only lose.

As I said, to me, discomfort, fear and the unknown are crucial in the projects I get involved in. To me, they are the basis of creative freedom and evolution.

Do you feel this collaboration gave you a new perspective on Romania, not only with Cristian, but with the whole Romanian crew? You spent a lot of time with them, I don’t know if you’ve ever spent so much time with so many Romanians in one place.

Yes, I spoke with my mom on the phone a few days ago and she told me my Romanian is much better since I came here.

To be able to speak Romanian for so long has been nice and very good. Still, for me, the relationship with Romania is a process that is still developing and it will take some time until I reach all the layers I want. There are still many directors and people in the Romanian industry I want to work with. (n.r. Radu Jude told Cultura la Dubă in an interview that he will make a film with Sebastian Stan).

Romanians have an expansive way of speaking, full of gestures, on one side they’re very warm-hearted, on the other, very stubborn. I laughed a lot with them and I liked feeling that energy, which, yes, feels very familiar to me.

For example, when I filmed a sequence with Alin Panc, I could barely stop myself from laughing – he had a way of being that made me collapse laughing with just a look! And Adrian Titieni, whom I had seen in the film Graduation, where he was outstanding, is an incredible actor. I was deeply impressed by his presence and professionalism and I’m very grateful to work with him, but also with the rest of the Romanian team.

Honestly, I was a bit scared to be with them on set, I had to find my Romanian again, I still have the accent I have, I wanted to speak as well as possible, to be as authentic as someone who left Romania after much less time than I left.

Well, they are 100% Romanian actors, with deep roots in the culture and the subtleties of expression, which, yes, intimidated me a bit at first. But precisely these differences created a special chemistry both on set and between us. It was and remains a tremendous experience for me!

But do you think that, beyond professional collaboration, our tendency to reconnect with our roots as we get older, to rediscover the stories lived by our grandparents, is actually about a personal need to truly know our identity? It’s like we see these things differently close to 40. How is it for you?

It’s exactly as you said. When you reach 42 (laughs), as I am, you think very differently. Especially when you lose people in your life.

When my father died, in 2021, a lot changed for me. Such an event completely changes how you see life, where you come from, what happened, what the history is, what the roots are, what made you, how it made you, etc.

And I go back again to what we discussed earlier: it’s not just about getting close to the roots or knowing them, but also understanding them and the compassion you must show so you don’t alienate yourself from them, no matter how shaky they may seem at times.

My father died, unfortunately, in a hospital in Romania.

Those days when he struggled for life, in his native country, in a place he had left long ago and only returned to visit, are still very hard for me to describe.

The states I went through then, the anger I felt toward this system that seemed torn from old stories about Romania, the helplessness in front of illness, but especially in front of the way this system works, the lack of transparency, communication barriers and the lack of empathy of the doctors for the patients or their relatives, I admit, all of that marked me.

I kept trying to understand how you cope with such a mechanism, especially since we’re talking about the medical system.

And when I read this script, I felt this parallel: losing my father in the twists of Romanian medical bureaucracy, the helplessness probably shared by many Romanians who lose their parents like this, resembles strikingly the tensions in Mungiu’s Fjord – the family broken by distance, the cultural values in conflict, and the mute fight to keep what remains of humanity in front of a cold, impersonal mechanism.

America had a big influence on me, because I grew up there. I feel very lucky that I had the opportunity to leave when I could, that I had my mom, who fought very hard so we could leave after the Revolution, to have other chances.

But I also feel this leaving as a kind of guilt. You sit and think that not many had these opportunities.

And you keep thinking what it would have been like if we hadn’t left, if we had stayed there. Or if we left and never returned, if I had lost Romanian completely. At this age you think about all that, you can’t help it.

In the end, you have to accept. This was your road. The only way. But you have to acknowledge all of it: the luck and the guilt and where you headed, but also where you came from.

And the work.

Yes! And the work. I tried to do something with this opportunity and sometimes I can’t even believe we are here and talking about this now.

Still, when you lose a parent, when you think about children, about how fast this life passes, you look beyond yourself. You sit and ask: what can you still say and do? What do you do with this platform you built, that you have?

This is my journey. Through the films I make and the profession I chose I want to contribute in a way that is beyond me, that surpasses personal ego.

That’s why I got involved in Alexandra’s volunteer project, Our Big Day Out, and in Andreea Borțun’s film (n.r. “Malul Vânăt / A River’s Gaze), because there are many women directors in Romania who have something to say.

And she had a story somewhat similar to my story with my mother, there are some small parallels there. And not only that drew me to this project, but also the way it was made: the preparation meant six years of research in rural areas, the filming stretched across four seasons, something quite rare for a fiction feature.

Over 60% of the cast are non-professionals from the regions where filming took place, ordinary people who were given a real chance to play what they live day by day and not just anyhow, but in a feature film. Including one of the main actors, the boy, which I think was a brave bet for a debut director, not many take that on.

So yes, I try to find more ways to contribute, but at the same time remain who I am, not pretend anything other than what I am.

I’ll end with something I should have started with: congratulations on the Golden Globe and on the Oscar nomination! I don’t know if you realized it, but the moment of your speech caused strong emotions in Romania. Maybe some said: why do we claim him, Romania has no merit. But the truth is that for Romanians the success of a Romanian athlete or artist abroad brings a kind of joy they can’t get from anything else.

Thank you so much! I said on stage exactly what I felt. And regarding Romania, what I can say now is that in those years when I left, there was a lot of chaos for me.

When you’re a child, you keep trying to find your home. You live here, then you go there, then to another country. As I said, when you’re a child, you want to be like everyone else. But, in the end, those years made me. Without all that chaos, childhood in Romania, leaving for Austria, then America, all that built me and otherwise I wouldn’t be here.

Maybe there are people who have an ok life, they have a whole family, nothing bad happened to them and they become geniuses, I don’t know, it’s possible. But every director I attached myself to, every writer, screenwriter, absolutely all have family stories, a childhood, situations that made them ask who they are, to discover what they are capable of.

Some traumas…

Exactly. Traumas either destroy you, or they give birth to you, or rebirth you.

And that’s your responsibility, to look at all parts of you, even the ones you don’t like, at the questions you’re afraid of, to see who you are, how you were made and then to ask: ok, now what do you want to do with that?

I understand maybe some look and say “he left, what the hell does he still have to say?”. But still, if I hadn’t had that moment there (n.r. at winning the Golden Globe), if I hadn’t said what I said…

I could have been on stage for an hour and still I wouldn’t have finished thanking everyone. You always dream of these moments, you think: if I get there, what will I say? In the end, that moment has to be “thank you!”. You don’t get there alone. You get there because hundreds of situations happened, for the people you met along the way and because you worked very hard.

That moment when you said, at the end, Romania, I love you, was it spontaneous or did you have it prepared? And why did you want to make that declaration toward Romania?

It was and it wasn’t spontaneous. It was first of all a message for my mother, or rather, from my mother, who always repeated to me: “You have to remember where you came from.” On the one hand, it represented her strength to leave with me, alone, our shared journey.

On the other hand, about the support of my stepfather, which was unconditional, and, equally, about my father and the relationship I had with him, about the moments spent together, where he brought to life dozens of stories from and about Romania, about Romanian music we listened to together, about the fact that I spoke with him only in Romanian – which created a very special intimacy between us, like an invisible thread only ours – and up to his own road, which wasn’t easy at all, but also about the stories about him discovered later from his friends, after I lost him.

From my point of view, it would have been inauthentic and unjustified not to say what I said.

Of course throughout my career I thought about this moment, to be on stage and reflect on my path, on my origin, to thank everyone who contributed to this life. So, in a way, it wasn’t spontaneous – in reality, I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t had this road and this past, which begins and will always begin with Romania.

It was my way of recognizing where I come from, of showing my pride in my past, of fully accepting it, for my identity and for all the people who were with me and shaped me, from there, from the country where I was born.

The post INTERVIEW Sebastian Stan: “Trauma either destroys you, or it gives birth to you, or rebirths you.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

The name Gigi Căciuleanu is synonymous with contemporary dance, both in Romania and worldwide. Alongside his teacher, Miriam Răducanu, he built forms of expression through movement at a time when Romanians lacked freedom. He then amazed huge names in dance, such as the Soviet ballerina Maya Plisetskaya and the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch.

He founded the first National Center for Contemporary Dance in France in Rennes and led the Santiago de Chile National Ballet.

He has lived in Paris for 50 years but has also left his mark on contemporary dance in Romania, both before and after the Revolution.

I met him in the French capital, in the Montmartre district where he lives, and I discovered fascinating stories, from his departure from Romania and periods of financial insecurity, where he ate only jam on dry bread for three months, to career-defining encounters with Pierre Cardin, Astor Piazzolla, Jean Michel Jarre, and Maya Plisetskaya.

***

In June 1940, when Romania was ordered to cede Bessarabia as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Gigi Căciuleanu’s grandparents and parents caught the last train to Bucharest.

“My grandmother didn’t take any jewelry, nothing; she only took the Bible and a cactus. If I were to write all my memoirs, I would title it The Bible and the Cactus. She had the Bible since 1900; she would read from it when we were children and she cherished it very much. The way my grandmother read to us made the Bible seem like an adventure book.

We all lived in the basement of a house on Eremia Grigorescu Street, and I was lucky to grow up between the two gardens, Icoanei and Ioanid. In my day, Ioanid was called Pușkin Park. We used to swim in the pond there.”

Gigi Căciuleanu first came into contact with dance when he was only 4 years old. It happened at a ballet school on Frumoasă Street in Bucharest, near George Enescu’s house.

“If you were to look through the keyhole into Alice’s Wonderland, you would see something. You know it’s Wonderland, but you don’t know exactly what it’s like. Dance is not just dance; it’s a necessity. It’s a visceral necessity, just as poetry is a necessity. And for me, poetry and dance and drawing lines are very connected.

My mother took me to ballet for two reasons: one – I was terribly mischievous, and two – my mother would have wanted to be a ballerina, but it was not considered appropriate at the time in our family for a girl to be a ballerina; ballerinas were considered unserious. Unable to be a ballerina, my mother became a botanist. She was very in love with plants. A plant is a dance. It is a line that develops, blooms, has a story. A blade of grass also has extraordinary strength; it comes out of the asphalt without any problem. Put me under the asphalt to see if I can get out. No! I don’t know how the blade of grass makes its way through.

Dance fascinated me in the sense that it hit me on the head; I was very scared because there were all kinds of young ladies who knew much more than I did. I was 4 years old; what does a child know at 4? I started to cry, and a blond, beautiful, very intelligent teacher, Nuți Dona, took me in her arms, and I asked her to marry me. Haha. Then she started training me.

She said: ‘Forget the figures and look: I’m here with you, you’re in an empty lot, you’re playing with a ball, you break a window, the neighbor whose window you broke comes out and scolds you, you answer him, and you are between the ball and the one who scolds you. You dance however you want.’ I don’t know what I danced for her, but I really liked the idea. That was freedom.”

He then continued to go to the dance school, and the meeting that was to decisively mark his artistic path was with the dancer and choreographer Miriam Răducanu.

“Miriam became our teacher when I entered the second cycle, which means at 14 years old. And suddenly, some subjects were added, one of which was called The Actor’s Art. I really liked it; at one point, I wanted to quit dance and become an actor, I realized I could do more things as an actor, and I really liked the idea.

She gave us dance classes, but it was not allowed to say “modern dance”; jazz was frowned upon as modern music. She told us: ‘Look, you are allowed to improvise, but not chaotically, but with some very precise tasks, just like jazz musicians do, she already pronounced the word jazz, which was taboo. Or like very talented musicians do in a Mozart symphony; they have a moment of freedom where they deviate from the written symphony and are allowed to add some nuances that are their own. I want to work on these nuances with you, in which you have the right to be free, but going through the experience of improvising with some very precise tasks.’

With Miriam, I realized that dance and the art of acting do not exclude each other but blend very well. She was the first dance-actor I met.

Together, the two created the famous late-night shows, which took place at the Țăndărică Theater in Bucharest in the late ’60s. The Nocturnes combined music, dance, poetry, and acting, and the interdisciplinary construction was something revolutionary at the time.

“She worked a lot with the theater, with Gina Patrichi, with Virgil Ogășanu. Virgil Ogășanu was part of the first Nocturne we did. He performed a monologue from Gogol’s The Government Inspector, which he had worked on with Andrei Șerban.

Many of the dances I did with Miriam came out of improvisation. Before the Nocturnes, we danced a lot in people’s homes. Whoever had a bigger living room would welcome us. People would sit on chairs as if at a theater.

How was this freedom possible in that regime where Romanians lacked precisely freedom?

“Romanians are Romanians; jokes saved us. Don’t forget that we are in a country of jokes, even if some people would turn you in for this. We always laughed at many things, and Romanians have always been very Latin. No matter how much they try to restrain us, we remain Latin.

Inspired by Brâncuși, Miriam had at one point created a dance called Flight; it was very static, only on an oscillation, the body only had some inclinations. And she was criticized by her colleagues at the opera, who said, ‘What kind of flight is that; in flight, you flap your arms.’ And I went to her and said: ‘Madam, you should know that I am very upset by what people are saying about your dance.’

And she told me: ‘You ask them where the feathers are on Brâncuși’s Bird. Don’t argue with them; just present artistic arguments.’ Miriam is very different from me. Miriam polished her dances, just as Brâncuși polished his sculptures. And I was very much about the immediate moment; I could change a dance in three seconds. During the Nocturnes, I always said that she was the pretzel, and I was dancing, sneaking through the holes of the pretzel.”

When the Nocturnes, theater plays, concerts, and opera shows ended, young people from Bucharest who were interested in the courageous side of art would gather at Preoteasa, the Students’ Cultural Center. There, great Romanian artists would give free rein to their imagination and improvise in a captivating way for the audience.

“We improvised crazily; all kinds of jazz musicians would come, the Berindei brothers, Jancy Korossy, Johnny Raducanu. It was a dialogue where I didn’t care about the way they played and what that was called in music, and they didn’t care what the movement we were doing was called. The audience would come like crazy for this. A lot of young people would come,” Gigi Căciuleanu now recalls.

Alongside Miriam Răducanu, Gigi Căciuleanu participated in the first international festivals. When the Bulandra Theater, with Liviu Ciulei as director, presented Hamlet at the Edinburgh Festival, Gigi Căciuleanu was dancing in the festival’s underground: “one day, we saw Marin Sorescu and Ion Caramitru come in and join us, in a good way, and they created a moment within our show. It was spontaneous and fit perfectly.”

Poetry, painting, and dance have always had echoes in Gigi Căciuleanu’s dance. He fell in love with the paintings of Kandinsky and Aivazovsky, which gave him the courage not to impose barriers on himself, to build forms in continuous motion, without a contour.

“What is choreography? It is a combination of movements that you invent. You invent the movements and their combination. I make a big distinction between a choreographer and an arranger. It’s like in music; there are people who invent things and others who arrange them. A lot of choreographers call themselves choreographers without being choreographers. They take things from here and there and glue them together.”

Gigi Căciuleanu left Romania in 1973 and settled in France, after a journey through Russia, Germany, Greece, and Belgium, refusing an invitation to move to America.

His meeting with the great German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch gave him the confidence that he could start over in a new world.

“After leaving the country so many times with Miriam, I told myself I couldn’t wait for visas for who knows how long. I was convinced I had something to say, and I couldn’t say it at the opera, where I had to do what I was told. I didn’t want to go to Moscow, but Miriam told me, ‘Go, boy, to the Russians, and learn the trade!'”

And did you go to the Bolshoi Theater?

“Yes, I stayed for one season, but that was enough for me; it was an extraordinary technical apprenticeship. It was classical, academic dance, but with more freedom. I had three extraordinary teachers; if a double jump was done, we would do a triple. I absolutely loved this technical challenge. And we had the opportunity to sneak in to the soloists, we would open the door and slip in. Maya Plisetskaya, Ekaterina Maximova, Vladimir Vasiliev were there; you couldn’t even touch them.”

He was not interested in staying in Moscow and continued to see the world through international competitions, along with his dance partner, Ruxandra Racoviță.

“We won the only contemporary choreography competition in Germany at that time. I won once, I returned to Romania, and Ruxandra told me: ‘Căciu, let’s do another competition, so we can get out again, so the world can see us.’

And we did a Romanian Bolero, the two of us with a third acting character, Dan Mastacan, who had some acting passages, and Raluca Ianegic, who presented a kind of flamenco, a symbol of death, as I was reading a lot of Lorca at the time. That dance piece won first prize a second time. It had never happened before that the same people would win in a competition two years in a row.

Pina Bausch had been the laureate of the same competition a few years earlier. I said that if I won the prize a second time, I would stay there. Dan Mastacan left for Paris immediately and had an extraordinary career in the world of film.

I stayed in Germany because Pina invited me to join her company. She was the director of the Essen School of Arts. She proposed that I work on choreographies with the people she had, her students, some of whom would later become very well known. Susanne Linke was there.

I had the extraordinary chance to work with those people; I created ten pieces with them. And those productions went on tour. Pina combined them with her pieces and my pieces. So I had moments when I wasn’t dancing and I would watch what she was doing, and she did the same.

That’s when I saw what a great dancer Pina was, and every time I went and said: ‘Pina, you are a divine dancer,’ even though she was like an animal, a combination of Salvador Dalí’s dinosaur and a giraffe in flames.

In the meantime, I convinced Ruxandra to return to Germany, and we left with her for Greece. We bought two boat tickets, without having anything to eat.”

The projects in Greece did not materialize, so Ruxandra Racoviță returned to Romania, but Gigi stayed for another 3 months in Greece, on the island of Hydra near Athens, where a Romanian woman they had met owned a house.

“In 40-degree heat, I ate nothing but dry biscotte with orange marmalade for three months, which Mrs. Ralu Manu had in the house, as she was on vacation. I literally exterminated that cupboard of biscotte—some slices of dry bread. And I would spread a little marmalade on it to make it last. Since then, I can’t stand to see biscotte; I can’t…”

He finally managed to get to Paris, a city that continues to captivate him today, after 50 years.

“When I arrived in Paris in June-July, the last thing on my mind was America. I even slept on benches by the Seine many times; it was possible back then, it’s not like now. Dan Mastacan had left to make a film in Germany, and I had nowhere to stay. But I said that I wasn’t leaving here.”

Now he met us in the Montmartre district, near the Sacre Coeur church, where he lives. He is 78 years old, and dance, cats, and poetry are now his main interests. He perfectly remembers the adventure of settling in France, without any source of income, trying to work at a cabaret while having just requested political asylum.

Ruxandra Racoviță joined him in this madness, and the great American ballerina Rosella Hightower, director of the Nancy Theater, gave them a chance: “she told us she had only one position for a dancer, but she would cut it in half, and we would split the salary. That’s how we got to Nancy, where later, she gave me the direction of the ballet there. Dan Mastacan was my assistant. And Ruxandra was a star dancer.

I stayed there for 5 years. From that company of 30 people, I selected 10 with whom I worked at night, and we then went on tour through France. Unpaid, that’s what we wanted. That’s how the French Ministry of Culture got to know us. And, at one point, I said, ‘God, I really want to do only this; I’m not interested in doing those ballets anymore, which, in fact, I didn’t even know how to do.’

The Ministry of Culture offered me Rennes or Montpellier. I wanted Rennes because it’s closer to Paris. I always gravitate towards Paris. I love Paris, no matter what it’s like. I got to Rennes and stayed there for 15 years. That’s where I founded the first National Center for Contemporary Dance.”

Through the actor Dan Mastacan, who had become the assistant to the famous designer and cultural figure Pierre Cardin, Gigi Căciuleanu received a proposal from Cardin to go on a world tour.

“I was on tour with a show in London, and Pierre Cardin came into the theater and saw me. He said he wanted me. I came by bus and showed Pierre Cardin what we were working on clandestinely at night in Nancy, and he said: ‘I’ll take you with this show.’ And that’s how he gave us tours all over the world: Japan, China, the United States, and a lot in South America.”

Pierre Cardin also connected him with one of the greatest Soviet ballerinas in history, Maya Plisetskaya, whom the young Gigi had only secretly watched at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

“Pierre Cardin calls me and says: ‘Don’t you want to meet Maya Plisetskaya? I’d like to introduce you to her and have her see you dance.’ And I said, ‘Of course, I’ll take the train immediately.’ I go, I arrive at the theater in Paris, and I dance to Ray Charles’s music. Maya likes it very much; she even wrote in her diary ‘I met a brilliant Romanian.’ She says: ‘Don’t you want to teach me some movements?’ I say: ‘Madam, these movements are not learned in three seconds behind a door.’

Years passed since then, and Pierre Cardin called me again: ‘I absolutely want to make a gift show for Maya, and I thought of you.’ Among the proposed titles, I chose The Madwoman of Chaillot; it seemed to fit my personality and hers the most. We were going to put on the show at his theater, Espace Cardin, in the heart of Paris; for me, it was a huge deal. And I said, ‘But how?’ And he said: ‘Maya will come to Rennes, and you will work there.’ And Maya came.

I was late at the station. Rennes is towards the ocean, 80 km from the ocean, so there were many seagulls.

I arrive at the station, the platforms were empty, like in the paintings of Delvaux (n.r. Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux), who drew stations with traffic lights, where there are some naked ladies.

‘Maya, please forgive me, I had rehearsals, let me help you with your luggage.’ She was silent, nothing, she just stood there with her braids in the wind. Then she says: ‘I know how it is. But please show me the movements you have thought of for me.’

And the improvisation starts again, of course. You come huffing and puffing, sweating, because it’s the huge star right there and you’re late? And I start outlining it for her on that platform; I had absolutely nothing prepared, but, anyway, I had Miriam Răducanu’s training. I put on the tape with The Madwoman of Chaillot and danced for her. She didn’t say a word. She let me go through hell on that platform, I stopped at one point because I couldn’t go on, and she says: ‘Yes, I liked it. But I have one single request. Don’t you dare do it any other way than how you did it here.’

Were you able to reproduce it then?

“The hell I was! No, but it didn’t even matter anymore. She didn’t want to see what I had. She wanted to see that my joints would hold up, because otherwise, she could have gotten on the next train and left.

We did the show at the Bolshoi, we did it in Japan. When we arrived at the Bolshoi, it was exactly the day the Russian White House was burning; the government building was on fire, everything was closing on the streets at 9, and Yeltsin gave an extraordinary dispensation so that Maya’s show could be performed at 4.”

In 1993, he founded the Gigi Căciuleanu company in Paris, with Dan Mastacan and Ruxandra Racoviță. At the same time, he returned to Romanian soil as a guest and contributed to the growth of new generations of Romanian dancers.

“Vava Ștefănescu, Răzvan Mazilu, Ștefan Lupu, Arcadie Rusu, Ioana Marchidan, Lari Georgescu – they all were part of my company, and now they are all something.

First and foremost, I taught them that they had to be themselves. That no matter how strict the choreography is, and I work very strictly on choreography, the choreographies are written precisely so that from this writing you can burst out when you want to. But you must have a thought-out foundation. Take a Mozart symphony. Yehudi Menuhin’s genius is not seen because he is interpreting something else, but because he plays it the way he plays it. To be free to be who you are—that is the great art.

To be ‘authentic,’ I was even called ‘Mr. Authentic,’ because I used the word often.

The choreography of the sea is written. There are physical laws. You don’t play with them. But look at the sea; you can stand all day long and you don’t get tired of looking at it. Or the fire in the fireplace. And yet, there are very clear physical laws that direct those things. That would be choreography.

What does Romania mean to you?

I don’t make a distinction between Romania and France. If I stayed in Paris, it’s because it looked a lot like Romania. It seemed to me that I had come home.

But what were the similarities?

There is a certain freedom of thought. There were also our connections with France, Cioran, Ionesco, Enescu. And it seemed like a terribly natural connection, and I spoke French from a very young age.

Romanians are very French, in fact, and the French are very Romanian. There are differences because we had different destinies.”

This article is part of the “France Week” series, an initiative by Cultura la dubă supported by BNP Paribas. So far, within this project, Cultura la dubă has presented the stories of 22 Romanian artists and cultural figures based in France.

The post Gigi Căciuleanu, a life dedicated to dance: “Dance is not just dance. It’s a visceral necessity.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

Who would have thought that 35 years after the fall of communism, Romanians would still be seeking healing? Cornelia Oncioiu is part of a generation of children raised in Romanian working-class families who, hardened by the shortages and horrors of the communist regime, didn’t know that the affection they showed their own children could matter more than what they put on the table.

Born in the commune of Dărmănești in Bacău County, at her mother’s insistence, she moved to Cluj when she was only 13 years old.

Today, she is one of the voices of the Paris National Opera, and her professional life is divided between the Opera Garnier and the Opéra Bastille, the performance halls that any artist or opera lover dreams of. She has shared the stage with international stars such as German soprano Diana Damrau and French baritone Ludovic Tézier and has worked with important directors like Robert Wilson and Andrei Șerban.

But her story is not that of a diva. Having lived in the French capital for over 20 years, mezzo-soprano Cornelia Oncioiu’s success is an example of courage, perseverance, and healing through music.

***

We met Cornelia Oncioiu right next to the Opera Garnier in Paris. I immediately noticed her Transylvanian accent, but she told us she was actually born in Bacău. Destiny led her to Transylvania, the Banat region, and then to France, so her Romanian has no trace of a Moldovan accent.

“I lived with my parents until I was 13, and when I was 13, my mother said: you’re moving to Cluj! We had some relatives there, and there was a family wedding. Since she couldn’t leave, she said I should. I didn’t want to go, I cried, I hated the idea. But many times, life has shown me that even if I didn’t want something, it happened so that I would get to where I was meant to be.

Do you believe in destiny, that a certain path is written for you?

Yes, I clearly do, because I have lived it, I have seen it happen so many times.

“After I finished 8th grade, I enrolled in the Mining, Oil, and Geology section at the Racoviță High School in Cluj. And it so happened that I met a classmate who was enrolled at the Cluj School of Popular Arts. We both loved to sing, and she told me I could enroll too.

I went with my uncle to register, and the date of the exam fell exactly when I was sick; I had a throat infection. I was treating myself with walnut shell tea and onion tea.

At that time, I sang pop music; I didn’t sing classical music at all, I didn’t know what it was all about. I had no musical knowledge. In Dărmănești, I had an extraordinary teacher with whom I did four years of kobza. And he also played the violin fantastically; you can imagine what it means to have a teacher who plays the violin in Dărmănești, a very small commune! But I never even thought I could have a career in music. I never even dreamed of it. I didn’t know what talent was. I just liked to sing. That’s all.

At the exam for the School of Popular Arts, I sang ‘Nu-mi lua iubirea dacă pleci’ (Don’t Take My Love If You Leave), as I was a big fan of Angela Similea. I sang the first verse and the chorus, and the teacher said, ‘Thank you, that’s enough.’

Of course, I was inhibited; I thought I must have disappointed him, that he didn’t like it, that he wouldn’t take me. And then I experienced one of the most exceptional moments of my life. There was such a great silence that it seemed to last an eternity. And then he said: ‘A voice like that, you hear it once every 25 years.’ And that left me speechless because I didn’t expect it at all; it shocked me.

I think that based on those words, I actually built my career.

And I think I latched onto that. And my younger brother, Călin, was and still is my biggest supporter; he was by my side unconditionally, I always felt him close, even at a distance. He lived and continues to live my successes and failures with the same intensity.”

Deeply moved, with tears in her eyes, Cornelia Oncioiu tells us how a teacher can save the life of a child otherwise condemned to a life without opportunities. “Mr. Valeriu Sorescu was an extraordinarily interesting man; he gave me everything, he shaped me, he opened my eyes. He, with an imposing stature like Pavarotti, came to my school to talk for me because I wasn’t doing well in math.”

The same singing teacher later encouraged her to study at the Conservatory when her parents were calling her home to Dărmănești.

“After finishing high school, I joined the Cluj Opera choir because I needed a job. I had a lot of financial difficulties because I had no help, no one.

My mother told me: ‘You don’t have money, come home.’ The concept of music didn’t exist for her. And I said, no, I want to continue making music, and I stayed. My singing teacher told me at the beginning: ‘You have to do classical music; you have a voice for opera music, leave pop music. You won’t do much with it.’ I still wanted to do pop music, until in my third year of singing, he gave me an aria from Azucena, from Trovatore (n.r. The Troubadour, by Giuseppe Verdi).

This woman, Azucena, mistakenly threw her own child into the fire instead of the other one, wanting revenge. All of this had a very big impact on me because it overlapped with events from my personal life that were very significant, very painful, and so, I immediately understood the text. And I said: ‘If this is opera, this is what I want to do!’

It wasn’t complicated for someone with my experiences. When you come from a family with an alcoholic father, with a mother who yells from morning to night, the emotional burden is always within you.

The choir master of the Cluj Opera was very favorably impressed and said, ‘Yes, indeed, that is a true mezzo-soprano voice. When there is a competition, you will come to the competition and you will be part of our choir, if you want.’

I worked there for 3 years, until 1997.”

In parallel, she participated in and won the most important competitions in Romania, such as Hariclea Darclée, Eugenia Moldoveanu, Sabin Drăgoi, or Ionel Perlea. She began to build a career as a soloist, enjoying the trust and support of the great Romanian soprano Mariana Nicolesco. In 1997, she moved to Timișoara, where she was admitted to the Conservatory, and continued to perform as a soloist at the Cluj or Timișoara Opera, and to sing on the stage of the Romanian Athenaeum in Bucharest.

“In the 2001-2002 season, when I was finishing my studies, I applied for competitions at the operas in Bucharest, Cluj, and Timișoara and had passed the stages at all of them. But, at the same time, as a result of a project with the French Cultural Center in Timișoara, I was going to have an audition in Bucharest for Monique Devaux, who is still the director of the Auditorium at the Louvre.

I traveled all night by train from Timișoara to Bucharest to have the audition in the morning at the Opera, in front of Mrs. Devaux. I knew it was for a lady from France, but I didn’t know who she was.”

She waited all morning on the stairs of the Bucharest Opera to be let in for the audition, and the wait was worth it, as that was the meeting that would radically mark her career.

“She liked it very much and wrote a letter of recommendation for me to the Paris Opera Academy, which is a kind of school, but the admitted people are like employees, in fact. We had teachers, pianists, free training, and our duty was to sing on stage if requested, or to be understudies for some shows.

There were only 5 spots and 250 applicants. When I got there and saw that, I started to tremble and said, well, now it’s life and death. When you put me in a situation like that, I go and show everything I can; nothing can stand in my way, I don’t see, I don’t hear, I disappear into another universe.

I got in here, and at the same time, the competition at the Bucharest Opera was finishing, and I said yes, I choose Paris!

It wasn’t the money that attracted me, but the study; I wanted to learn as much as possible, to be in an environment where I had as much high-level information as possible, which I have to admit I didn’t have in Romania.

How many years did you study at the Academy here?

Two years.

And what happened after that?

Well, even before I was admitted to the Academy, they already offered me work. I did my first production as an understudy, right here at Garnier, with the role of Cornelia from Giulio Cesare (n.r. opera by Handel). The Opera also helped me with accommodation because I had only found a place for the period when I was starting the Academy. But until then, I had nowhere to stay. They found me an apartment right across from the Opéra Bastille.

Back then, there was a FNAC right in front. And they had the habit, as they do now, when there is an opera premiere, of highlighting all the records of that opera. And I didn’t know who those artists were, because at home we didn’t have YouTube, we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have anything. I knew nothing about Mark Minkowski (n.r. French conductor) and a lot of other greats from here. I had the cast list, but it was only when I went into FNAC and saw Mark Minkowski, Mark Minkowski, Mark Minkowski everywhere, and all the people who were in the show, that I broke out in a sweat and said: ‘I can’t believe it, I’m going to go rehearse with these people tomorrow.’”

This year, Cornelia Oncioiu celebrates 21 years since her debut at the Opéra Bastille in Dialogues des carmélites. In all this time, her CV has become impressive, being a constant presence in the productions of the Parisian opera – Giulio Cesare, Elektra, Louise, The Barber of Seville, Madama Butterfly, Parsifal, Lucia di Lammermoor, Traviata, Le Soulier de satin are just a few of them. She has also sung at the Bordeaux National Opera in Rusalka, at the Grand Théâtre d’Avignon in Rusalka and Peter Grimes, and at the Marseille Opera in Madama Butterfly. Noticed by specialists in Paris, she has been invited to be part of performances staged in Amsterdam, Geneva, Monte Carlo, Tokyo, Santiago de Chile, and Shanghai.

“It’s not enough to sing beautifully or well; you have to be very responsive. That is, the moment you are told something, you have to immediately deliver what is asked of you. This is very important. Whether it comes from a conductor or a director. If you don’t react immediately to do what is said, in general, you are not given a second chance. In opera, at this level, no one really has patience with you.”

Although she was performing an episodic role, a critic from the New York Times noticed her in Traviata, alongside the main soloists – “Cornelia Oncioiu brings rich mezzo tones to the few lines she has to sing,” the New York Times article states.

Through music, she has seen different corners of the world, but she has collaborated least with Romania, being better known in France, her adopted country, than in her native country. In fact, this is the first interview she has given to a Romanian publication since settling in France.

How did you manage to integrate into everything that the world of Parisian opera means, beyond the artistic aspect?

It wasn’t easy for me. The difficulty comes from the difference in culture. The environment is not the same. We Romanians are more open; we get straight to the point. They are more diplomatic, they discuss things differently, they never say things to your face.

It’s hard at the beginning from a human point of view, until you make friends, until you get used to it. What most determined me to stay here was the cultural level and diversity.

If I had stayed in Romania, I don’t know what my life would have been like, but here I managed to buy an apartment, I managed to do so many extraordinary shows, to meet so many people, to sing under the baton of so many important conductors, to discover the world, to see art, to discover literature. You don’t feel like going back as long as you can benefit from all of this.

It’s true that for a soloist, as in my case, it’s very difficult because you always have to be well prepared, you always have to be at a high level. Any problem that arises puts you at a disadvantage and can quickly bring you down.

Whereas if you’re in a troupe in Romania, you don’t have the same problems. In general, you stay until retirement. It’s true that here you don’t have the same security or stability, but you have a lot of different soloists all the time, some of the world’s immense artists, the repertoire is very varied, the level of the orchestra is completely different, with extraordinary guest conductors.

Which work dynamic do you think is healthier, the one in Romania with all the artists employed or this one where artists are independent and work on a project basis?

I’m sorry, I don’t know if someone will accuse me or won’t like my answer, but I definitely opt for the second one. As a soloist, you realize you have to maintain your voice constantly, to work, to study. When the competition is high, of course, it makes you study and be prepared, because otherwise, someone else will take your place. This is also valid for directing, not just for soloists.”

Among the great directors she has worked with at the Paris National Opera are the American Robert Wilson and the Romanian Andrei Șerban.

“For me, Robert Wilson will remain hard to match, from many points of view. With him, I did Madama Butterfly at the Opéra Bastille, in 2009 and 2014, with me in the role of Suzuki. He insisted on the idea that when you perform and address someone, the feeling you want to convey doesn’t just go to the front. The energy circulates in multiple directions: up, down, front, back. If there’s a partner behind you, you don’t see them, but you have to feel them; you have to feel the energy with them, to make a connection with them.

A lot of soloists go on stage and care very little about their partners; they only focus on themselves, on shining, and that’s not okay.

With Andrei Șerban, I have some fabulous memories; I really liked Andrei! We are a bit made of the same dough. We both have a kind of simplicity and a direct style of communication, we understood each other very well.

I did L’italiana in Algerie at Garnier in 2010. And before that, Lucia di Lammermoor at Bastille. Andrei is spontaneous, he’s intelligent, he’s modest, he’s creative, free, he’s human, very human. He’s also charming, but it seems to me that the charm in people like this also comes from the fact that they have kept something of their childhood somewhere, that innocence in their soul.

What are the greatest satisfactions you have in your work?

The most satisfying moments are when you have partners you are on the same wavelength with and there is intensity. Intensity in emotions, in dedication, in responsiveness. It’s nice when your partner gives you a true look in the eye and isn’t the type who looks through you and sings their part, thinking about what they have to do.

With what partners have you experienced this?

Diana Damrau comes to mind now, for example, when we sang Traviata together, Sonya Yoncheva.

Then, there’s also the joy that comes from self-transcendence – when you manage to do difficult things that you never dreamed of.”

Having left a country that was still learning what democracy was and arriving in the heart of a culture that puts artistic freedom first, Cornelia Oncioiu has managed to build an international career through her own efforts and by eliminating any cultural barriers in her path.

The Paris National Opera, a benchmark of innovation and modernity, continues to work on dismantling clichés and brings multidisciplinary productions to the public, in which classic texts are sometimes combined with contemporary dance, minimalist scenography, and an international cast.

While street breakdancers were invited on stage there alongside the opera soloists in the revolutionary production Les Indes Galantes, the Bucharest National Opera was still trying to recover after numerous cases of corruption and the famous racism scandal in 2016 when Romanian artists demanded the removal of foreign collaborators and booed the great ballerina Alina Cojocaru, along with her partner, choreographer Johan Kobborg.

This year, the Bucharest National Opera again blundered with a campaign trying to “educate” the public – “How we dress at the opera” – presenting a hypersexualized and clichéd image of a fashion model wearing an evening gown. In contrast, at the Bastille, given that it is a common activity for them, many French people go to the opera directly from work, wearing casual clothes.

“I have been here for 20 years; it is a huge creative force, and the mix of classic and contemporary has become normal. But the audience here is much more open than in Romania.

In Germany, the role of Elvira from Don Giovanni was played this year by a man (n.r. the Brazilian Bruno de Sa), and this stirred numerous comments on the internet. What’s the problem? I mean, who are we to judge? And why should we judge? How does it affect us?

What do you think is the role of opera today, when the world is so dependent on digital technology, and the attention span for a subject lasts only a few seconds?

The role of opera is to make you live experiences other than the ones you are used to; it helps you see various stories from the past, many of which are still valid today, you see how people reacted back then, to know other cultures, other behaviors.

I believe that at the opera, you can experience feelings that I don’t know if you can experience in other forms of art. Of course, you can be moved in front of a painting, in front of a sculpture, or at a theater play, but when the vocal intensity is mixed with music, with scenography, with directing, with dance, with the text, with poetry, it is difficult for that to be equaled by anything else.

I’m curious if your parents got to see you singing on the stage of the Paris Opera.

Yes, my parents came to Paris a few times, and my father, before he died, came a few times and saw me in Paris, Nantes, and Bucharest. And my mother has come a few times.

My mother still lives in Dărmănești; she knows I’m here, but my parents were never very interested in my career, what I do professionally, my evolution. However, I am grateful because they gave me an education and what was necessary in my childhood. Now, as an adult, I have also understood the difficulties they went through.

What else connects you to Romania? Do you still visit your country, are you interested in what’s happening there?

Yes, of course, I’m interested. I was very affected and very preoccupied with the elections; I never in my life wanted a president to be elected as much as I wanted Nicușor Dan to be elected now. Oh my god, what a relief I felt when I saw he was elected. I think I would have cried for days if it hadn’t been so.

It’s interesting that you’re so interested, even though you no longer live there.

Well, you know why? (with tears in her eyes) I want to cry when I think of all the people who worked and struggled before so that we could have what we have now. It’s as if some people no longer appreciate anything. We no longer want Europe, we no longer want freedom, we no longer want anything, we only want ourselves, Romania? Because Europe is taking everything from us. I don’t understand. What is Europe taking from us?

I think about the people who died in the Revolution and the progress that has been made, because progress has been made. Some people don’t want to see it, but I say it has been made.

We are free to leave whenever we want, wherever we want. Isn’t that a good thing?”

***

This article is part of the “France Week” series, an initiative by Cultura la dubă supported by BNP Paribas. So far, within this project, Cultura la dubă has presented the stories of 22 Romanian artists and cultural figures based in France.

The post From Dărmănești to the Paris National Opera, the voice of mezzo-soprano Cornelia Oncioiu is the cry of a generation appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

Born in Bucharest in 1964, Sophie Negropontes left Romania when she was just 12 years old. Today, she owns one of the most important art galleries in central Paris—Galerie Negropontes. Last year, she expanded with a new location in Venice.

She is the granddaughter of General Eremia Grigorescu, a hero of the Romanian army at Mărășești and Oituz, after whom a street in Bucharest’s Icoanei neighborhood is named. She is also the granddaughter of Elena Negropontes, a descendant of the famous Greek merchant family Negropontes. Her father was Dan Eremia Grigorescu, one of the most important Romanian photographers, active in Romania and abroad from the 1950s to 1989, and a correspondent for Radio Free Europe.

Her relatives were abused and terrorized by the Securitate (communist secret police), and her family had to start over from scratch in France after 1974.

“My life is a story about luck, and my journey after leaving Romania is a miracle,” says Sophie Negropontes in an extensive interview with Cultura la dubă.

***

A few years ago, we discovered Galerie Negropontes in Paris while seeing an exhibition by the Romanian artist Mircea Cantor. That’s how we learned the gallery’s owner was of Romanian origin, and we were curious to know more about her story.

It was a national holiday in France in June when Sophie Negropontes opened the doors of her gallery for the Cultura la dubă report. The gallery owner, whose space is located right between the Louvre and the Pinault Collection, greeted us with a smile, speaking perfect Romanian.

“How did you manage to preserve your Romanian so well?

I always spoke and still speak Romanian with my mother,” she told us.

She introduces herself as half-Romanian, half-Greek, with French culture. She feels a strong connection to her Romanian roots thanks to her parents, who were both Romanian, but her childhood memories in Bucharest are mostly tied to the trauma her family endured during the communist era.

There was a feeling of fear, a lack of freedom, an inability to trust. I know we used to listen to Radio Free Europe, and I was little, going to school, when my dad told me: ‘Even if someone shakes your hand, you must not say that we listen to Radio Free Europe.’

My godfather was deported to Siberia for nine years, my grandfather spent ten years in prison because he was a judge before. The entire family was at least beaten by the Securitate,” Sophie Negropontes begins her story.

Her father, the photographer Dan Eremia Grigorescu, a friend of Mihail Sadoveanu, published a series of photo albums during the communist period that later won international awards in Washington and Leipzig. Thanks to his art, foreigners were able to discover fragments of Romania: Voroneț, Folk Art from Northern Moldavia, the Danube Delta, and Brâncuși’s works in our country.

He also produced television reports for “Teleenciclopedia.” He visited and photographed major European cities, bringing back unique images from a world inaccessible to ordinary people in Romania.

“He managed to leave for a few months to make some TV shows and albums. He made an album about Rome, one about Paris, and one about Venice. My dad used these albums to show another side of France and Rome. He brought them to Romania at a time when everything was closed off, and people didn’t know what was happening in Paris. At one point, he was caught on the street and they cut his beard with a knife because you weren’t allowed to wear a beard in Romania.”

In 1974, the photographer and his wife left Romania for good, and Sophie, who was ten years old at the time, remained in her grandmother’s care. Two years later, she also managed to leave the country with the help of the Greek government.

At that time, there were some economic ties between Romania and Greece, and the Negropontes family was quite well known in Greece. We requested to leave for a two-week trip to Greece. I left with a small suitcase, and then I arrived in Paris, where my parents were waiting for me. I got there at the end of August, and by September 15th, I was in school.

Did you know the language?

A little, very little. Not enough for it to be easy, in any case.

And how did your parents integrate? Did your father continue to work as a photographer?

Dad worked very little in photography and started working for Radio Free Europe as a journalist.

I remember at the time I had a lot of friends who told me that what happened with Ceaușescu was not dignified, that it wasn’t worthy of a democracy.

But after 45 years of communism, how could Romania know what a democracy looked like? Two generations of people had no information about democracy, not even the culture or education for it. How could they know what democracy was like?”

Did you ever think of returning after the Revolution?

I wanted to go with great enthusiasm on the first medical aid trucks. But I was 24, and my parents were very stressed to see me leave for a world where no one knew exactly what was happening. Plus, it wasn’t possible because my dad was very ill. He died shortly after, in 1990.

Sophie Negropontes has a degree in economics, but she inherited her father’s interest in art.

“At an age when young people tend to go to shopping malls, I would go to museums. That’s how I was raised by my parents.

I went to business school, and right after, I went to Hong Kong, where I worked for a French perfume company. I came back because my father was very sick and I worked for a textile group. Then, I was a partner in a web company, a search engine for websites. I handled the commercial launch. I’ve always done commercial launches or product launches; I’ve always worked with creative people.”

She opened her gallery in 2012 and inaugurated it with an exhibition dedicated to her father.

It was a crazy moment when I said to myself that I wanted to be in a field that I truly love and do what I know how to do, which is product launches. The first exhibition was with my father’s photographs—portraits he took in ’68—and a design piece.

Then I started working with a French designer. Everything was born from the photo album Brâncuși. That’s how the idea came to create sculptural, architectural furniture—unique pieces, limited series, or made-to-order.

How did you manage to promote the gallery in a market where there were already so many other galleries? How does someone new succeed?

By working a lot. With a lot of hard work and a lot of luck. I had zero network and zero contacts. Things happened organically. One relationship led to another. Maybe there was a big order that allowed us to finance a new collection, which was successful, which allowed us to be at a professional fair, then a second professional fair, and so on.

When I created the gallery 13 years ago, gallerists at the time would just wait. At a fair, you would just wait. People would come, say they were interested in these things, and nothing would happen right away.

I don’t know how to work like that. I would follow up, call people back, reconnect, schedule meetings, and from that, the business was born.

Did you know from the beginning when you opened the gallery what kind of art you wanted to promote here? Were you interested in anything specific?

The art I love most wasn’t actually the art I promote. I love 15th- and 16th-century Dutch and German painting, the Renaissance, and Surrealism. I had a very academic education and I continue to do very academic visits.

But I have an interest and a curiosity for many things. Some artists are very interesting, not because I like everything they do, but because their journey and their explorations are interesting.

What catches your attention in an artist that makes you decide to promote them?

The pieces and their quality, of course. What they want to say with them, hoping it’s not too obscure. I’m convinced that a piece can stand on its own. If it’s accompanied by two pages of text to read, that’s a bonus. A piece can be bought, placed in a living room, in a bedroom, and so on. But there are some contemporary pieces that only exist through their discourse.

If it’s a railing made from a piece of aluminum and it’s explained over four pages that it represents the boundary between life and death, paradise and hell… okay, but what do you do with that railing? Do you put it in the middle of your living room?

So, for me, there is a part of contemporary art that doesn’t convince me.

At her gallery, Sophie Negropontes promotes creators of luxury decorative pieces that combine artistic flair with high-quality, original materials. She also works with photographers, sculptors, and, more recently, jewelry designers. Among the artists she collaborates with are the Italian Gianluca Pacchioni, the Romanian Mircea Cantor, and the French couple Martine and Jacki Perrin. The gallery is located on Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Paris, at the end of which the Cartier Foundation is now being built.

“I am very directly involved in the artistic selection and the relationships with the artists, which is, in a way, the particularity of the gallery. I work with a relatively small number of artists. Many galleries of the same size work with 50 artists; I work with 15. So I dedicate time to each one.

Then, I need to get along with them. That is a fundamental thing. On a human level, not just an artistic one. On a human level, first and foremost.

You mentioned that not all contemporary art convinces you. Can you explain who and how the value of an artist is determined? How does an artist become sought after by collectors or exhibited in major galleries and museums?

In contemporary art, it’s also about marketing. For example, I once saw a South American painter at Art Basel whose painting was selling for one million euros. A year before, it was at 200,000, and a year before that, it was at 15,000. So something happened that made that work popular or made it picked up by a very, very well-known gallery, and the artist’s reputation grew through the gallery’s name.

It’s a pretty complicated world. An artist’s rating is set at auction houses. When you put a piece up for auction, it either sells or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t sell, that’s pretty bad. At the auction house, they always set a low starting value to give it room to grow. It can sell for a lower price than the gallery price. Or an artist’s piece can sell for 2,000 euros at auction, while in the gallery, the same artist has another piece for 30,000 euros. But they have nothing to do with each other. The artist’s rating, however, for the collector, is at 2,000 euros.

Because I have some artists who work exceptionally in glass, for example, to build their reputation, I didn’t put them up for auction. Instead, I worked with several museums, and they have pieces exhibited in multiple museums. This doesn’t give a commercial value, but a cultural value.

And how did you manage to convince the museums to exhibit or buy them?

With a lot of hard work and thanks to them, because they are very good artists in a specific niche, the glass pieces.

But do museums have dedicated people who visit galleries to discover artists?

Nobody visits anymore because they don’t have the budgets. So I have to go to them.”

Last year, Sophie Negropontes also opened an exhibition space in Venice on the Grand Canal as part of the Masieri Foundation.

“It’s a collaboration with the university that runs this foundation, and we restored the place, which is an old brick facade, while the entire interior of the building was done by Carlo Scarpa, one of the most famous Italian architects.

Why did you want to expand to Venice?

“Because I was doing a lot of fairs—three or four a year, first in Paris, London, New York, then I stopped doing London and Paris, and did New York, Miami, and Los Angeles last year, plus Saint Moritz in Switzerland.

I believe that in Venice, people talk about art much more than anywhere else for a long period of the year. The Biennale lasts for nine months. At a fair, art is talked about for four or five days.

I was doing shorter exhibitions here in Paris, and I decided to do exhibitions that would last longer, four months, perhaps with more depth, giving people time to come and talk. In Venice, I have an exhibition on three levels for a year.

What are the challenges for a gallerist in Paris? What kind of difficulties do you encounter?

Paris is more of an image than a market. For me, it’s not the best market. We do very well in the American market, which is now becoming a huge challenge due to taxes.

France is not the biggest buyer. The French are much more classic. I always say that we should consult history and we will find out everything. The best museums were, before the revolution, in Moscow, in Saint Petersburg, or in the USA. Why? Because the people who had money then invested in their contemporary artists. And now, these are the most famous artists, and those museums have the largest collections. The Russian collections or the American collections have the most pieces.

The French are more cautious, more classic. And the people who go to Venice are art lovers, they have more time, they like music, they like opera, architecture—they are more oriented towards that.”

While in major countries around the world, contemporary art is a mature market where hundreds of millions of euros circulate, in Romania, contemporary art museums and galleries are still an undeveloped field. Neither public institutions nor most Romanian business people have yet understood the cultural and financial potential of the creative industries. This is also the reason why Sophie Negropontes has not been very involved in the Romanian market.

“I did a major exhibition in 2017 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest with my dad’s photos from the Brâncuși book, which were first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1982. But I don’t have this image of returning to Romania.

However, the market, which is not completely mature for art objects or art furniture, could be ready for artist-designed jewelry. I believe that one way to maintain a connection with Romania is through what I do.

Last year, I was offered to open a gallery; a space was made available to me. But when you open a gallery, you have to say something about it. For example, Venice was, first and foremost, a choice to create dialogues between pieces and the location, between people. It was something more intellectual and artistic. And then, business-wise, it’s going well.

In Romania, I don’t know the people there well enough. I have some relationships with decorators, but the pieces I present are more difficult to understand. The furniture we have is special, exceptional.

What kind of people buy such works?

In America, they are people who, of course, have enough money. They are accompanied by decorators. And I get along very well with a lot of decorators because I always work in a very reliable way: things arrive on time and are of high quality.

For example, if someone sees a piece they like, they send the decorator to see it. They discuss its quality and where they could put it in the house. It’s a very natural dialogue.

Does the same thing happen in France?

In France, most decorators want to produce things themselves; they are more like designers.

Extremely passionate about what she does, Sophie Negropontes says she feels happy every time she enters the gallery, even if she no longer has much free time.

“Since last year, I’ve been working about six to seven days a week because I work here until Wednesday or Thursday, and then I go to Venice and work until Saturday or Sunday. It’s a very intense schedule.”

She spends her vacation in Greece but returns to Romania for professional events and would like to get to know the contemporary jewelry market in our country.

“When I think of Romania, I always have a nostalgic feeling for the scent of blooming linden trees in Bucharest. It’s the first thing that comes to my mind.

The people in Romania are extraordinary because they are extremely cultured and educated, in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term ‘education.’ But there’s a kind of slightly pedantic intellectualism, disconnected from a pragmatic side, without which nothing works.

“Would you be interested in running a museum?”

Perhaps that, yes, I would.”

This article is part of the “France Week” series, an initiative by Cultura la dubă supported by BNP Paribas. So far, within this project, Cultura la dubă has presented the stories of 22 Romanian artists and cultural figures based in France.

The post Sophie Negropontes, born in Romania, owns a major art gallery in Paris and Venice appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

He left Romania for Argentina at 19, and dance opened his horizons to a new world, full of possibilities, to diversity and understanding. He studied ballet, modern dance, and contemporary dance, was part of a church choir, danced in one of Paris’s famous cabarets, and settled in the French capital, where he is a dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher.

Decisively influenced by the great Romanian choreographer Gigi Căciuleanu and trained by his partner, Ruxandra Racoviță, Daniel Pop carries on the love for contemporary dance and enriches it with his own ideas, movements, and emotions.

I met him in Paris just hours before he was to go on stage at the Opéra National de Paris, where he is part of the opera Manon.

***

Daniel Pop’s story begins 37 years ago in Târgu-Mureș. Born in one of Romania’s most ethnically mixed communities, he grew up surrounded by diversity, which later helped him adapt to the different cultures he encountered.

“I was raised by grandparents, parents, teachers with this idea that if you learn a foreign language, you’ll have an extra chance in life. They told me: be curious, be open, accept diversity.

In Târgu Mureș, we have this cohabitation of space with those of Hungarian origin. Our neighbors are Hungarian, my mother went to primary school in Hungarian, and so I grew up with this exercise of multiculturalism. It seemed very important to me as an adult, a professional, if I have something to say and am encouraged and warmly welcomed into a new space, then to come and accept this challenge and propose such an exercise of artistic creation in several languages, where at some point, in fact, language was no longer a barrier,” says Daniel.

He always felt a magnetic attraction to dance, even if his father would have preferred him to box, because “boys need to know how to defend themselves.”

“Being a child with bronchial asthma, I had quite fragile health at that time and was forbidden to do sports. I danced from a very young age in front of the television, imitating stars like Marilyn Monroe, Britney Spears. I had a lot of habits that no one understood. I went to ballet somewhat secretly.

I was beaten quite a lot as a child, in front of the block. I was very whiny, often sick, I wasn’t allowed to eat ice cream. I went to classical dance because what I saw on television toughened me up a lot, and I told myself, ‘look how beautiful, how graceful, how good it is there.’

I used to imitate gestures a lot; I imitated my mother who smoked and I secretly smoked pencils. I watched some films about cabaret and taught imaginary children dance and all sorts of subjects.

And I say this now because, after all, I danced for many years in a cabaret, I became a dancer, and I also became a teacher. Somehow these childhood dreams became reality.

How were your childhood dance classes?

I went to ballet classes in Târgu Mureș, at the general school gym. At one point, my parents were called to give their consent for me to receive a scholarship to the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow.

My teacher said it would be good for me to try to go to a ballet school in Russia because boys are needed and because I am tall and could develop very well.

I think ballet saved me from my medical condition, in the sense that I developed my lung capacity. However, my parents were still very worried and did not agree to my leaving for Moscow.

What did you do after that?

At 18, when I finished high school, I had the opportunity to go to Argentina to a dance school, through a very good friend from Târgu Mureș, who had been there for two years studying cinematography.

I was supposed to prepare for the choreography section of UNATC in Bucharest, but it didn’t inspire me at all to go to Bucharest. I think there were also these stereotypes about the relationship between the province and Bucharest. At that time, I was part of a church choir and a high school theater group.

Those at Ariel Theater in Târgu Mureș, where I was already working as an amateur, told me: “Dance is against the clock; go for dance because you can do theater at any age.”

And somehow my work is somewhere at the intersection of theater and dance. My personal artistic projects and interests led me on this path, so somehow I still managed to have some contact with theater.”

In Argentina, however, he was to discover contemporary dance, in a completely different way than he perceived dance, through the lens of the rigors imposed by ballet exercises. There he studied at a dance school and worked in parallel as a waiter to ensure an income.

At the time, Gigi Căciuleanu, who was to become his mentor, was the artistic director of the National Ballet of Chile.

“He was already working with professional dancers; I wasn’t prepared for contemporary dance at that level, and he proposed that I come to Paris to attend the Conservatory, where his lifelong partner, Ruxandra Racoviță, was a professor. She had the Contemporary Dance department, and I was her last generation of students. She trained me in contemporary dance, and after I finished, I started dancing in a company where Gigi Căciuleanu staged shows.

And I worked in that company for about 5-6 years, touring through Europe, dancing a lot here in France and Italy.

What convinced you to make the transition from ballet to contemporary dance?

A very great embarrassment I felt in a contemporary dance class in Buenos Aires where, effectively, after 10 minutes, I picked up my bag to leave. When I put my hand on the doorknob, the teacher stopped the class and said: “Are you sure you want to leave? I think there’s something for you; you just have to give it time.” And it was a challenge, because I’ve always been very agitated, very wild, preoccupied with a hundred things, somewhat dispersed in space, and contemporary dance opened up a vision where anything was possible.

But where did that embarrassment come from?

From some movements that were not necessarily in my comfort zone or in what I knew how to do, namely the very rigorous ABC of classical dance.

When I discovered contemporary dance, I didn’t know these elements; everything was about weight, about breathing, about falling to the ground, about slowing down, movement about speeds, different volumes, bodies. All these things I liked very much and embarrassed me at the same time.

I was somehow afraid to throw myself harder. I saw that there’s always room for more, and in classical dance there’s room for more and movements can be perfected, but classical dance goes through a certain repetition of movement until it becomes perfect, whereas in contemporary dance, that doesn’t exist.

Contemporary dance has more to do with movement that will be nourished by a thought, by an emotion behind it, with deciphering certain cultures and subjects. I think it’s something much more universal and much more open to people.

And you made the complete transition? You no longer danced ballet?

Yes, I continued classical dance as training, because it seemed very rigorous and very important for the body and for body posture. Continuing with classical dance is a kind of morning prayer, but I plunged into the world of contemporary dance, being very convinced that this is the path I want to take.

I also had this inclination towards the world of theater; I really liked talking about different subjects, having different characters, not necessarily being in this world of the romantic prince who has to carry the princess or the swan through space.

Then, in Argentina, I also discovered the world of modern dance, namely jazz, musical. And when I arrived in Paris, apropos of what you work to support yourself, I auditioned for a very famous cabaret here, Paradis Latin – the cabaret that is placed in the same line as Moulin Rouge and Lido. It was built by Gustave Eiffel in an architecture very similar to that of the tower.

It’s a cabaret where the cancan dance was invented and first danced in Paris.

I worked there for 5 years at night, so I could do what I liked during the day – contemporary dance. I was somehow between the two worlds, the world of night and the world of day.

And I also taught in a modern dance club and various body maintenance techniques.

Why did you choose to continue doing this in Paris? Was there no place for contemporary dance in Romania? Or in Argentina?

In Paris, I found my place, and I really liked the diversity. I think what I had to say had to do with something very universal; I liked having colleagues from all over the world.

Then here there is an artist’s status, an “intermittence du spectacle” regime.

This wage system is unique in the world. It is a self-sustaining system. Depending on what you declare and what taxes you pay to the state, they then ensure you a decent living between projects.

How has being part of this much more open world of contemporary dance changed you on a human level?

I believe that contemporary dance is about a lot of introspection and it is an intimate and very internal journey of one’s own self, of being. At the same time, you can be a messenger, a connecting point between cultures, between people, between different languages, between different forms of expression.

I don’t think I would be the same if I hadn’t lived in Argentina for three years and if I hadn’t immersed myself in a Latin American culture.

And regarding tradition, identity, and where I come from, I have always tried to preserve this very beautiful and varied relief of Transylvania, the land where I was born, and to bring it through movements, through a certain melancholy, into dance.”

At the time of our meeting in Paris, Daniel was preparing to go on stage at the Opéra Bastille, where he has been part of the production and cast of the opera Manon since 2020. Following an audition, he was selected for the dance corps. Then the celebrated tenor Benjamin Bernheim chose him as his stage partner for several scenes, so in some performances, he is an actor. In parallel, he was also appointed choreography assistant.

“The choreographic proposal for this show has quite classical and neoclassical content, but also has jazz, modern, and contemporary dance influences. Based on these competencies acquired through the multitude of aesthetics my body has gone through during my years of study, I managed to get this casting.

From the outside, it seems that this multidisciplinary approach is increasingly common in the world of opera and ballet in Paris. I’ve seen shows where hip-hop dancers have performed on stage alongside tenors and sopranos. How is this modernization of a classical world viewed from within?

I think France has always been avant-garde and has aimed to experiment with new forms. Artistic transversality and this interdisciplinarity have found a cradle in France, through its history, through its revolutions. These revolutions were also felt in the arts, because an artist is an active citizen of society through the work he does, through the risks he takes, and through this universality with which he responds to new challenges.

The last few years in France, it seems to me, have been about breaking these barriers, about trying to go hand in hand with this idea of democratizing dance, of opening up spaces a lot, of mixing the world of professional dancers with amateur dancers.

At the state level, cultural policies have been designed in such a way that dance reaches many new spaces, and even large institutions, such as the opera, bring new voices from certain territories very far from classical forms. Of course, there have been controversies, and there always are controversies. If you look, for example, at the Louvre pyramid, there was a big scandal because something totally innovative, something angular, was intervened in a heritage space, and there were all sorts of conspiracies.

It’s a very clear example that we can live in a very large diversity, and this was also the reason why I stayed here.

Because daily I met new people, from new cultures, from new countries, and it was somehow an adopted land where we all felt equal together.

And from a geographical point of view, it was a strategy to be in Paris because I could go anywhere, east, west, north, south, very easily and return here, as the French say, to a pied-à-terre, having a foot very anchored in this culture and in this diversity.

Have you also become a French citizen?

Yes, after 12 years of living here, as a European citizen with the same rights, after all, as the French. It was a personal decision to also take French citizenship because it seemed to me that it somehow crowns a certain effort I made to understand, without judging, why the French are cold and distant, when, in fact, they are just reserved. I came from a collective education, like communism, to the land of enlightenment thinkers, philosophers, great thinkers, where individualism is paramount and where a person, an individual, must learn to fend for himself.

For me, it was very clear that I am like them, and a citizenship does not cancel the one I have and the identities I have, but it is something that enriches me, something that completes me and makes me feel more complex.”

Although he is already perfectly integrated in France, Daniel frequently returns to Romania, where he has also laid the foundations for an artistic residency in Saschiz, Transylvania. This summer, his project, entitled International Artistic Residencies Camp “LEGĂTURI” (CONNECTIONS), is already in its 4th edition. Every year, international and national artists are invited to meet students from our vocational faculties, as well as the local community.

“I feel at home in Transylvania. And in the places where I grew up, where I am always welcomed with open arms, and where we have the camp, I feel that I receive a lot of trust in the artistic formats I propose.

In Saschiz, I propose a mix of different cultures and worlds: that of art school students, with internationally renowned and national artists, with children from culturally disadvantaged rural areas, with key people in their communities, namely those who work in education and tell children about our activities.

In the first year, they were a little more reluctant when they heard so many different languages on the street, in their village; it was something very new. But when I brought a fashion designer who presented at Fashion Week in Paris, they came, stood close to the door, very quiet, listened to this artist with whom I moderated a discussion about his journey, about how he markets his products, about how he creates in Paris. And at the end, when a video presentation of the Fashion Week runway ended, they were the first to shout bravo and applaud.

Then, I think of the children who took eco-fashion workshops with this designer; they learned to sew, to give new life to an old garment.

All through gestures and through body language, they were able to connect. And then, for me, that was clear proof that when we meet and try to communicate with our bodies, we overcome many barriers.”

***

This article is part of the “France Week” series, an initiative by Cultura la dubă supported by BNP Paribas. So far, within this project, Cultura la dubă has presented the stories of 22 Romanian artists and cultural figures based in France.

The post Daniel Pop, Romanian-French dancer and choreographer: “When we communicate with the body, we overcome many barriers.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.