20/04/2023 - The drama follows a single mother in a poor Romanian village as she tries to find her place after working abroad

Romanian director Andreea Borţun, whose most recent short film, When Night Meets Dawn, was selected in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2021, and who is also the co-founder and co-curator of Romania’s only screenwriting residency, Pustnik, will dedicate an entire year to the shoot for her feature debut, Blue Banks. The project is being produced by Gabriela Suciu through Atelier de Film (Romania), and co-produced by Jean-Laurent Csinidis and Jérôme Nunes through Films de Force Majeure (France) and Ales Pavlin through Perfo d.o.o. (Slovenia).

The screenplay, written by Borţun herself, follows Lavinia (Mihaela Subţirică), a single mother who is trying to make a living for herself and her son, Dani (Ştefan Costea), in a poor Romanian village. When she gets a job in Marseille, she has to leave Dani behind. While she’s away, he is left with endless possibilities, trying to figure out who he can become and orbiting around different male figures – his surrogate father, his biological one and his older best friend. Later, an unexpected event will force Lavinia to come back home.

The film will be shot over 47 days throughout the entire year, as the story covers all four seasons. The budget amounts to almost €1.3 million, with circa €180,000 coming from the Romanian National Film Center. Blue Banks was developed at Less is More, First Films First and the Budapest Debut Film Forum. It was also presented in the CineLink Sarajevo, Venice Production Bridge and TIFF Industry Days programmes, winning the Transilvania Pitch Stop Award.

Gabriela Suciu tells Cineuropa that her team had to build Lavinia’s house from scratch, as the director had a very specific image of a Southern Romanian village from her childhood, and “many old houses we scouted proved to pose a danger to the actors and the crew”.

The director says that the exodus of people leaving Romania for better working conditions abroad has had a huge effect on her country’s society over the last two decades. While the material changes are obvious, she was more interested in the inner changes in the life of women in rural areas. “In 2018, I started to study the effects of this migration on the lives of women who had a history of working abroad. I realised it is not very often discussed how they perceive their home space when they come back on short visits, and how they need to deepen the roots they have here. I changed the perspective and examined how ‘home’ looks for the immigrant who comes back,” Borţun explains.

Blue Banks will be delivered in the first quarter of 2024. Follow Art Distribution will release the picture domestically a few months later.