06/11/2025 - The family drama starring Adrian Văncică and newcomer Tudor Butănescu focuses on a troubled father-son relationship

The winner of a Berlinale Silver Bear and an Alfred Bauer Award for his first feature, If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ada Condeescu
film profile] (2010), Romanian director Florin Şerban is currently preparing the shoot for his sixth effort, No Place for You. The film is being staged by Şerban’s Fantascope Films, with EarlyBird and Scharf Film Productions serving as co-production partners.

The screenplay, written by the director, follows Marius (Adrian Văncică from The New Year That Never Came [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Bogdan Mureşanu
film profile]), a surgeon and hospital manager in a town in provincial Romania who has a troubled relationship with Ioan (Teodor Butănescu), his 18-year-old son. At the beginning of the story, Ioan acts as a vigilante and, at night, vandalises the cars illegally parked on pavements. A fight with the owner of one of these vehicles ends in manslaughter, which will have serious repercussions on Ioan’s life and his relationship with his father.

The film’s budget amounts to €1.3 million, with circa €500,000 coming from the Romanian National Film Center. DoP Liviu Mărghidan will shoot the movie over 25 days starting in mid-November, in Bucharest and the town of Reşiţa. Janir Izdrailă, Cristina Richter and Cosmin Dominte play supporting characters.

Şerban tells Cineuropa that his film is about “a father-son relationship that doesn’t work. It is about a generation, my generation, who suddenly woke up in the 1990s in a world full of promises and tried to take advantage as much as possible: universities, responsibilities, various positions, politics, businesses and so on… Many of these things would have been impossible for our parents’ generation, and we tried to take as much as possible – even everything, if possible. At the beginning of the 2000s, the children came along, and we felt that we weren’t lacking anything as parents, so we simply let them grow up. Now they are adults, and we feel like we don’t recognise them any more, because we might never have truly known them. This is what my film is about,” the director explains.

Şerban also says that it took him a year and a half to find the right actor to play his young protagonist. After meeting more than 1,000 potential candidates, he finally met Butănescu as a first-year student in Romania’s main film school, UNATC. He enrolled the young man in his acting school, Şcoala de film, which entailed such a challenging regime that Butănescu decided to put his studies on hold so that he could dedicate himself fully to the film.

According to the director, No Place for You should be picture-locked in February, with a domestic release in the following autumn or in the spring of 2027.