28/10/2025 - Paula Oneţ’s deeply personal feature inviting us into the life of a Romanian artist living in France won the Best Romanian Documentary Award at Astra

A deeply personal documentary, Paula Oneţ’s Still Nia invites us into the life of Ştefania, a Romanian artist living in France. She is still suffering the consequences of her early years, when debilitating headaches led to several serious diagnoses, including a brain tumor and multiple sclerosis, in 1990s Romania. Years and years spent in hospitals, suffering long and painful treatments, robbed her of her childhood. Decades later, she is still fighting for a normal, accomplished life.

At Astra, the film was also shown in a thematic sidebar, “Art as a Tool of Self-Exploration and Healing”, and this is exactly what Ştefania does, as she continuously tries to leave behind the small, sick, fragile Nia, as her parents used to call her. With endearing honesty, she describes her struggles to Oneţ and Carmen Tofeni’s attentive camera, making us wonder how much of her artistic life in the present comes from her struggles as a child. Now, Ştefania refuses to be Nia anymore, and uses various artistic ways to set herself free, including suggestive personal rituals such as letting pictures of her as a child being taken away by the sea. 

Throughout the documentary, we get glimpses of her life turned upside down by a misdiagnosis. As one watches her describe her experiences (at one moment, we learn that Nia was forbidden from eating dark chocolate, as it “was bad for her brain, but white chocolate was good”), it is hard not to think about the fact that it will soon be ten years since a nightclub fire claimed the lives of 64 people in Bucharest, the biggest Romanian tragedy since the 1989 Revolution; dozens died because no Romanian hospital had the necessary equipment to treat the victims' extensive burns, and yet representatives of the medical system continuously assured the public that everyone was aptly treated.

Although the documentary doesn’t shy away from Ştefania’s past, her present and future are more important. The director uses various tools to bring us closer to the protagonist's mind, for example a dissonant music composed by Ştefania Becheanu herself, suggesting the debilitating headaches she used to suffer from. An important part of her recovery are the physical exercises she undergoes with various physiotherapists and, as we witness them, it becomes evident that they are meant to heal both her body, which suffers the consequences of almost no physical activity in her childhood, and her mind.

An important part of Ştefania’s story is this image of herself as being both a body and a mind, two parts of her being that must be in tandem so she can have a chance at happiness. Perhaps doctors, especially those who think there is absolutely no overlap between the two, should pay attention to her, as she now has the vantage point of a person whose body was treated in gross exaggeration, while her mind was left alone to fend for itself.

Still Nia was produced by microFilm (Romania) and co-produced by Seppia (France).