This film is set in northern Rumania at Christmas, 1999. Nelu, a student, lives in Baia Mare, a mining city at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Petru, a violinist, lives a few kilometers away in Valeni, a village situated on the other side of the mountains. This is the land of the Maramures, an ancient people who have known how to preserve their identity over the centuries by absorbing only some of the "external" elements that have been inevitably left by their numerous invaders - the Roman and Ottoman Empires, and, lastly, the dictatorship of Ceausescu.
"A resistant people who today find themselves face to face with a new instance of great change: after the 1989 revolution the West and its market economy has entered wielding great power in all Rumania. If some youths choose to stay to build something useful in their own land, many others dream of going away and leaving the mountains in order to attend the universities in the city or perhaps to emigrate to western Europe in search of a better paying job that would allow them to return one day" (Fabrizio Scapin).
Biography
film director
Fabrizio Scapin
Fabrizio Scapin (Pinerolo, Turin; 1970) attended the video school for social documentation directed by Daniele Segre in 1995. He later directed a video production workshop under the aegis of an IRRSAE - Piedmont pilot project for training workers and putting them back on the work force. Since 1996 he has lived in Paris where he works with a film production house. For over one year he has been conducting workshops on video making with groups of adolescents from the outskirts of Paris and has been making video installations. His first film, Occidente, was screened at the 1998 Torino Film Festival and other important international reviews.
FILMOGRAFIA
Occidente (cm, 1998), Maramures (2000).
Cast
& Credits
Director of photography: Andrea Calderini, Fabrizio Scapin.
Editor: Nicolas Défossé.
Production company: Fabrizio Scapin, 10 rue Léon, 75005 Parigi, Francia, tel. +33-1-45353998, e-mail fabrizio.scapin@usa.net.
Co-production: Dominique Beloir per Mirage Illimité.