Written/Unwritten

Film Info

Romania 2017 | 20 min. Director: Adrian Silisteanu

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Written/Unwritten

Synopsis

Outside a maternity ward, a Roma family is announced their underage daughter has just had a baby girl. Pardică (50) doesn’t seem to celebrate the moment; he is very displeased with this early pregnancy, for which he blames his wife. However, things become even tenser when a hospital employee asks them to sign some papers and discovers issues related to their IDs and their status as parents of the underage new mother. The imminent danger of state authorities separating them from their daughter determines Pardică to take action.

Cast & Crew

Director

Adrian Silisteanu
Producer

Anamaria Antoci, Adrian Silisteanu
Screenwriter

Claudia Silisteanu
Director of photography

Adrian Silisteanu
Main Cast

Sorin Mihai (Pardică), Elena Ursaru (Minodora), Alina Serban (Giuberina)
Editor (Cut)

Mircea Olteanu, Costi Zaharia
Sound Design

Ioan Filip
Original Score

Sergiu Popa
Production Design

Alexandra Alma Ungureanu
Costume Design

Alexandra Alma Ungureanu
Makeup

Dana Roseanu

Director's comment

The idea for this film emerged following a real life situation which I witnessed outside of a maternity ward and which, over the years, obsessively came back to my mind.
A Roma family waiting for their underage 15-year-old daughter to give birth suddenly found itself in the absurd situation of being separated from her, because of faults in the system. It is true that they were neither the natural parents of the girl nor the adoptive ones, but still, they were the ones who had raised her ever since she was little. The lack of documents to prove this fact triggered a completely absurd situation, at the basis of which there stood actually the conflict between two different cultures - a written one versus an oral one.
Can we state the superiority of either of them?
The purpose of this film is not necessarily to give an answer to this question but to raise a series of questions related to the way society tries to settle the interactions between its members, not taking into account the specificity and individuality of each of them.

Biography

Adrian Silișteanu was born in Bacău, Romania, on 5 March 1975 and he graduated in Cinematography in Bucharest. Studying also Digital Cinematography at the National Audiovisual Institute in Paris, he worked for a short period as digital imaging technician. Romanian Director Adrian Sitaru’s debut film HOOKED was also Silișteanu’s first film as director of photography. He shot all of Sitaru's features, BEST INTENTIONS, DOMESTIC, ILLEGITIMATE, FIXEUR and his shorts WAVES, THE CAGE, LORD, HOUSE PARTY, EXCURSION and ART. He worked with the well-known Romanian theatre director Silviu Purcărete for his first motion picture SOMEWHERE IN PALILULA and he was the cinematographer for the two seasons of the Romanian version of the HBO TV series IN TREATMENT. He also filmed many other movies including the feature films HO-HO-HO (dir: Jesus del Cerro) and THE WORTHY (r: Ali Mostafa) as well as for the EFA-awarded short SUPERMAN, SPIDERMAN OR BATMAN (dir: Tudor Giurgiu).

Filmography:

2016 WRITTEN/UNWRITTEN
2012 THE DITCH