We talked to Ștefan Bîtu-Tudoran and Diana Caravia, of microFILM, the director and producer of Battalion Records, the film that won the Eurimages Co-production Development Award at the last edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (see the news). The Romanian project focuses on a group of young artists who want to start a cultural revolution by hijacking Romania’s oldest music studio.

Cineuropa: Could you describe the key elements of the film? What led you to take this project on in your respective roles?
Diana Caravia: Even though most of my work has been in arthouse cinema, I have been thinking in the past couple of years about how we seem to be making films for this very small, niche audience. We keep speaking to the same people. And while that dialogue is, of course, valuable, it can also become a bit of an echo chamber. I think it’s just as important to find ways of connecting with other audiences, too. That’s why working with Ștefan made total sense: when he first proposed Battalion Records to me, it was, funnily enough, a documentary. The reason why that’s funny is because now, three years later, it has evolved into something completely fictional and wild: it starts out as an absurdist heist, and then drifts into completely unexpected territory. We may or may not have zombies. What I really connect with is the frustration at the heart of it, which was there from the beginning and never changed: this sense that every gesture of rebellion, every attempt at change, gets neatly packaged and absorbed by the system. And instead of preaching or proposing some grand solution, which we obviously don’t have, the film takes the absurdity of the world we live in and runs with it, in a loud, chaotic, funny, and even scary way.

Ștefan Bîtu-Tudoran: I guess it all started in my grandparents’ kitchen, where you could always hear old Romanian communist-era songs playing on the radio, day and night. These tunes always gave me a sense of nostalgia. But underneath that feeling, I was aware that the heartwarming music, which has this sinister power to make me relive my childhood years through sensations, is in fact part of something way darker than it portrays – Ceaușescu’s regime. I was aware of the censorship, the restrictions and the cultural propaganda from those times, and I’ve always felt that our country never really managed to get past the totalitarian ghosts and the old way of thinking. Those instincts are calcified in our bones, passed down from one generation to another. It finally seems to wash away as we grow older, but there’s still a great danger, represented by right-wing movements. At the beginning, I just wanted to talk about how our local cultural industry is fuelled by this type of totalitarian thinking. There’s a lot to unpack from Guy Debord and Mark Fisher’s ideas. Basically, this heist is kind of a fantasy I have, and my response to the inefficient, slow-moving and narrow-minded way in which culture is approached in Romania and maybe other countries from this part of the world. I’m not talking about the artists, but about the system in which they are forced to create.

The film is described as an “absurdist heist satire”. Could you go into more depth about what you are trying to express with this genre?
DC: The film is changing a lot as we work on it. As mentioned before, it started out as a documentary, then became a heist satire, and now it’s mutating into something stranger, with different genre layers colliding. Our biggest challenge at the moment is finding the right balance: keeping the playfulness of genre, but making sure that we’re not treating genre as decoration. Working within MIDPOINT Feature Launch, with our tutor Pavel Jech and our colleagues in the programme, has really pushed us to go deeper. We’ve been challenged to question what kind of story we’re really telling, and how to shape these genre twists so they don’t feel random, but actually reveal something about the world we live in. It will definitely not be the kind of Romanian film that people usually expect.

SBT: The current draft of the script is actually some kind of a Vaporwave film that encompasses all of the genres Diana mentioned. It goes hand in hand with the idea of people being manipulated into believing anything nowadays and our inherent need to believe, adhere or fight for a cause – no matter how twisted, mutated or zombified that cause or idea is. That’s what we’re going for by mixing all of these genres in one, cohesive story – but not too cohesive. I would categorise the type of cinema I’m going for as a transgressive, sensorial cinema where I try to blend comedy and horror elements within the same scene.

How do you plan to use the Eurimages Award to take the next steps in the process? 
DC: Financially, the award will most importantly allow us to strengthen the foundations of the project. We want to bring in a researcher and historian to go deeper into the ideological theory the film plays with, which will help us take the script to its next stage. In terms of prestige, the Eurimages Co-production Development Award is one of the strongest signals of trust we could have hoped for. We’re very grateful to the jury for granting it to us, especially knowing how many strong projects were in competition. I think they connected with the vision and message, and understood that we needed this support at exactly this stage.

Do you have any news to share about the near future of the film?
DC: We’re still in development, polishing the next version of the script. On the practical side, our immediate goal is to apply to the next session run by the Romanian National Film Center (CNC). This will be a bit of a test, since the law has just changed this year, and the call will come with new rules and a new structure, so we’ll have to see how it goes. After that, we plan to start applying in other countries as well. We already have some potential co-producers who are following the project with interest.