We interviewed Romanian director Mihai Mincan about his Venice Orizzonti title Milk Teeth [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Mihai Mincan
fiche film], focused on the disappearance of a little girl in Romania in 1989. The aftermath of the mysterious loss of her sister will force young protagonist Maria (Emma Ioana Morgos) to grow up earlier than she expected.

Cineuropa: The idea for Milk Teeth first arose around 2019, and it took you years to finalise it. At what point did you realise you had found the “film’s voice”, as you described it?
Mihai Mincan: Just like any film process, it's very hard to pinpoint a certain moment when it started, especially because your own personal life and the person you are at that moment also play a role in the making of it. The starting point was me reading a Romanian communist militia file about the case of a missing girl from spring 1989. The first image was actually a girl leaving with a red bucket full of nutshells, sent by her parents to take out the rubbish, and then disappearing forever. I attempted to create a script that would be closer to a genre film, and I eventually finished it in 2020, just before COVID-19. Then, as the pandemic came and went, I set the script aside for a long time. And then, around 2022, I read it again and thought it was horrible. I had big ethical issues with the way I had treated the story, and I just felt like I was taking this case of a girl who disappears and making it into some sort of true-crime Netflix show.

At that point, I started thinking about what actually attracted me the most when I’d read the dossier, and it was this image of a little girl in front of a cement wall. It also came from one sentence that wasn't about the missing girl, per se, but about her sister. The dossier is huge, but the only time the sister was mentioned, in just two lines, was in a report in which one militia officer said that she was doing well at school, getting high grades, but that she had stopped talking. Her classmates started calling her “The Mute”. And this is what stuck with me: the image of some kind of mute terror.

Is there anything in particular that happened to you or that you remember, which you then used in the film, or is it less personal than that?
It's a mix, I think. A friend of mine actually disappeared. He was found two weeks later, and nobody from our group of friends really understood it. We don't even know today what happened, and at the time, nobody talked about it. At the same time, what I’ve tried to make is not some kind of “autobiographical memory” film, but rather covey a feeling of loneliness, of something very fragile – something you cannot really put your finger on.

It's never easy to work with very young actors, but it's never easy to work with actors in general and be guaranteed a good result. How did you get such a stunning performance out of Emma Ioana Mogos?
It’s all down to her. You said two sentences, and I agree with one but not with the other. The one I totally agree with is that it's never easy to work with actors. However, I would never agree that it's not easy to work with a child. On the contrary, it's so much easier than with adults because they don't have egos, and they don't have any need to be in the spotlight all the time. They don't ask you for huge backstories in order to understand where they came from.

Emma came to me through a regular casting process. I must have seen around 100 girls her age, and she immediately stood out to me, although I still kept looking, as casting often takes time, and I wanted to explore more options. In the end, I chose her for many reasons: she just had something that felt right for the role. I wouldn't say that the fact that she hadn’t directly experienced the world in which the film was shot had any kind of impact on the result. The first time I spoke to her, we talked about her dog and her grandfather, who had both died recently, and about what it means when someone important disappears from your life without saying goodbye. She also seemed to understand loneliness, which was a key point of the film. Unfortunately, today, it is seen as a major danger, and many parents try to fill every moment of their children’s time with activities, instead of letting them experience actually being alone.