20/06/2023 - Alexandru Solomon’s staged documentary explores Romanians’ fascination with a dead monk

After delving into the realities of Abkhazia, the partially recognised state on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, in his previous documentary Tarzan’s Testicles [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alexandru Solomon
film profile], Romanian director Alexandru Solomon directs his gaze towards a similarly elusive part of life in present-day Romania: the local obsession with Arsenie Boca, a monk and theologian persecuted by the communist regime, who died weeks before the 1989 Revolution.

Solomon’s documentary Arsenie. An Amazing Afterlife [+see also:
trailer
interview: Alexandru Solomon
film profile], which has just screened at the Transilvania International Film Festival, begins with footage from 2017, when the director cut his hand in front of the Palace of the Patriarchate in Bucharest, to protest against the visit by Kirill, the Russian Patriarch and a fervent supporter of Vladimir Putin. Solomon’s protest brought him to the attention of the Romanian authorities, who, completely oblivious to the fact that this was a performance, advised him to get psychiatric help. This footage seems to suggest another initial approach to the topic, but, as he is constantly refused access by the Orthodox Church (the director is a Jew, and we learn this very early on in the documentary), Solomon decides to create a more welcoming context: through an agency specialising in finding extras for movies and adverts, he hires a bunch of “free-thinking” people and guides them on a pilgrimage centring on Arsenie Boca’s life.

The approach brings to mind another documentary, Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan and Andrei Gorgan's Free Dacians [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], which explores some Romanians’ fascination for a highly apocryphal view on the Dacians’ heroic deeds and wholesome way of life before they were conquered by the Romans almost two millennia ago. Similarly to Free Dacians, Arsenie. An Amazing Afterlife shows a bunch of individuals doing and saying rather bizarre things on screen, which makes for particularly funny viewing, as it offers moments of pure (albeit rather involuntary) comedy.

From the very beginning, we know that these individuals were selected based on their interests and opinions regarding Arsenie Boca and mysticism, so the border between reality and fiction is quite unclear here. Even the most honest people start acting as soon as a camera is trained on them, and here, one might feel there was an agenda from the very beginning. Pushed in the right direction by the director (at times we see him asking questions on screen), the protagonists casually talk about Boca, his “miracles”, his persecution by the communists and even his interest in the activity of the Legionary Movement, an ultranationalistic and violently anti-Semitic organisation that was banned in 1942.

In the end, what we get is a range of highly unorthodox (pun very much intended) opinions on elusive topics and the message that there will always be people whose worldview is quite different from ours. In the documentary, these people pour parts of their realities onto the audience, and one may end up thinking that said realities might be more “miraculous” than the imagination of even the most talented screenwriter. After all, genuine stupidity is so hard to fake.

Arsenie. An Amazing Afterlife was produced by Romania's microFilm, in co-production with Paul Thiltges Distributions (Luxembourg) and Hi Film Productions (Romania). The documentary will be released domestically by microMULTILATERAL on 1 September.