Adrian Sitaru
at FilmTv Lab

Meeting with Adrian Sitaru, protagonist of Europe, Now! section of BFM 36, led by Ilaria Feole of Film TV. After the discussion, his movie Ilegitim will be screened.

Emerging personality of the Romanian “new wave” and hailing from Deva, Transylvania, forty-six years old Adrian Sitaru is – despite his relatively young age – an established filmmaker. Gifted with a sharp and deep-cutting vision, he analyses his home country and its society with ferocious disenchantment, favouring topics which are borderline disturbing. This way, he exposes the contradictions and ambiguities of a people that seem to live in the constant anticipation of a change that never comes. Multifaceted and ever-evolving, his filmmaking style is never digs in its heels, becoming richer in truth and closer to reality as it evolves from film to film. Maintaining, in spite of this, a ruthless, almost cynical objectivity.

Since his debut with the short film Valuri (Waves, 2007), awarded at the Locarno Film Festival in the section “Pardi di domani”, Sitaru has mainly gravitated within the festival circuit. His films, however, have been very successful, not just at home but also in other major film markets such as France and Germany. Aside from the many shorts and five feature films, on his resume he can also boast TV movies and a series. His first feature film, Pescuit sportiv (Hooked, 2008), presented at the “Giornate degli autori” within the Venice Film Festival, already had the markings of a very peculiar style: narrated through the main characters’ POV shots, it portrays with astonishing clarity a couple’s dissolving. The following Din dragoste cu cele mai bune intentii (Best Intention, 2011) and Domestic (id., 2012) analyse the notions of community, family and sharing by means of sensitive topics such as illness and death. The more recent Illegitim (Illegitimate, 2016) e Fixeur (id., 2016) focus on extreme themes such as incest and child prostitution to scrutinize the complexities of human nature. In doing so, they play on light-and-dark contrasts exploring the ambiguity of behaviours separating the public from the private sphere, and contemporary society well beyond the Romanian borders.