After its world premiere at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, the first feature by Romanian director Andrei Epure, Don’t Let Me Die [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Andrei Epure
fiche film], has been screened in competition at the Linea D'Ombra Festival in Salerno. We took the opportunity to speak to the director about his movie, which will be released in Romanian cinemas on 5 December by Independenta Film.

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Cineuropa: Your film expands on a short you presented in the Cannes Critics’ Week, called Intercom 51. What made you think that this story deserved a more extensive format?
Andrei Epure: I shot Intercom 51 over three days, and in a way, I just wanted to prolong the sensation that I had while making the short. I felt that I shouldn't leave this universe or these characters behind too soon. I was interested in creating a kind of liminal space and also in making a visual testimony – a sort of eulogy – to somehow archive a life that passed by in anonymity and indifference. The challenge was to create a kind of portrait, but in absentia, with only the things that remain after her death. It almost seems like she's more present after death than she was in life. And perhaps this strong attraction that Maria feels stems precisely from this. Perhaps, despite being so close, she never had the courage to approach Isabella and learn more about her. Hence this morbid curiosity that drives her to investigate and to bear this grief so profoundly.

The movie is half-dark comedy and half-horror. The daytime scenes are more focused on bureaucratic issues, while the nighttime ones are far more disturbing and dreamlike. How did you come up with the tone?
I think this kind of dark comedy/horror also resonates with the idea of being in between. In a way, the film decides the way it progresses by itself. When I think about a movie style and make a shot list, I like to leave some things in that have the potential to surprise me as well. And also, when I have a dark comedy, I like to try to inject a bit of horror to see how they can communicate with each other. I think it is indebted to the Theatre of the Absurd, especially Eugène Ionesco. He was an inspiration for me because he said that humour works better when it's a bit scary.

There are some scenes that are repeated with a few variations, and some objects that appear multiple times. What’s the idea behind that?
I think it all started because in Romania, it is said that after someone dies, they roam all of the places that they had visited while they were alive, for 40 days. After that, they ascend or whatever. I found it interesting to have this sort of delay after your own death, and I wanted to bring this kind of repetition to the afterlife as well. I had the idea of using a few objects as separators between life and death. I chose the door, of course, but also the intercom – as an object, but more so as a sound.

In your film, the environments speak louder than the characters, and the space is mostly devoid of human presence.
I was trying to give it some kind of flatness and to pay as much attention to the background as I was paying to the foreground. Of course, the characters are central, but I was trying to play with the perspective. So, there are moments when you feel like the perspective changes a bit because you start with the main character and you have her gaze throughout the movie, but then you also have this dissonance and these departures.

One character says, “We believe in community and empathy,” but the reality depicted is quite different because it seems there is an absolute absence of human connection.
I tried to create these characters that would be so consumed by themselves that they don't have any capacity left to see or to think about others. It's not really indifference to others; it's just too much self-involvement.

The original inspiration for the film was a true story, as experienced by your co-writer and producer Ana Gheorghe.
It's something she saw in her childhood. And for her, it was not just about a dead body that she saw for the first time, but also the reaction – or lack thereof – of the people around the death. Here, they try to hide the fact that something is wrong and someone is dead. They try to continue with their daily lives… But also, they don't really care about this woman, because nobody actually knew what her real life was like.