The Other Romania

An interview with the director of THE OTHER IRENE, Andrei Gruzsniczki

As part of the Festival’s ‘Border Crossings’ season, audiences saw a Romanian production, THE OTHER IRENE directed by Andrei Gruzsniczki. Just before the screening of the film, I had an opportunity to talk to the director. Sipping his tea, Gruzsniczki tells me about “the story behind the story” of his movie, specifically “I didn’t choose the story. It chose me.”

Based on true events, THE OTHER IRENE recounts what actually happened to one of Gruzsniczki’s friends. In the film we see a security guard, Aurel, whose wife goes to work in Cairo and never comes back from her trip – having allegedly committed suicide. Naturally Aurel wants to find the truth behind his wife’s death but his search is hindered on all possible fronts as he faces the harsh reality of bureaucracy and a total lack of understanding from everyone around.

“In the very beginning I wouldn’t dare to make a movie out of this story”, says Gruzsniczki. He then adds that after two years he went back to the subject and looked at it from a strictly documentary perspective – with proper distance. With time, he closed in upon the main character to portray the tragedy of “a lonely man, a poor guy who is trying to find out the truth and never discovers it”. As the director says, “in the beginning it’s a story about love, then it’s a story about finding a way to the truth… It’s a story of how much you know your other half, how you never really get to understand, really know the person next to you”. The “total indifference around [Aurel], the total lack of compassion, was the most important thing that finally made me decide to make this movie”, says Gruzsniczki.

The director talks about his interest in the subject of relations between people, especially between couples, and about issues connected with knowing and not knowing each other. When I call him “a director of human relations” he laughs and answers, “yes, at this point that’s who I am”.

But as Gruzsniczki points out, THE OTHER IRENE is also a picture of Romania today: emmigration for reasons of poverty and lack of opportunities, especially from the areas outside of big cities, is quite a common pattern; just like the bureaucratisation of social life.

Looking at the problem of relations between people in contemporary Romania from before the Revolution, Gruzsniczki comments that before the Revolution, in the communist era, “[the Romanians] were more human to each other, even if we didn’t have lots of things”. Now, with the emergence of the middle and upper classes, and a poor ‘base’ of the society, the models of family and human relations in general have changed.

Asked about his future projects, Gruzsniczki enthusiastically talks about his plans of putting onscreen a story of a separated couple who face various pressures in their relationship. The director promises that his own personal vision of love and life is not going to be as bitter and sceptical as that presented in THE OTHER IRENE.

THE OTHER IRENE was screened on Saturday 26 September

MARTA MACHALA