Celebrating its world premiere at the 41st Warsaw Film Festival, Y [+leggi anche:
recensione
intervista: Maria Popistașu, Alexandru…
scheda film] marks the directorial debut by acclaimed Romanian actress Maria Popistașu, who also plays the lead role. Co-directed and co-written with Alexandru Baciu, the film delves into a dark chapter of Romania’s unresolved past. We sat down to discuss its interpretation on screen.

Cineuropa: Y brings to mind Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days [+leggi anche:
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trailer
intervista: Cristian Mungiu
intervista: Oleg Mutu
scheda film], which tackled the abortion ban in Ceaușescu’s Romania, as it deals with some of the consequences of this – abandoned children and illegal adoptions. How did you arrive at this topic?
Alexandru Baciu: I was interested in stories that simply cannot have a happy ending, where resolution itself feels impossible. And we both wanted to explore guilt, but not guilt tied to personal actions. Rather, a kind of inherited guilt, passed down culturally and even unconsciously.

Maria Popistașu: Once we’d thought about inheritance, we followed that thread – the way we inherit not just DNA, but also the moral and emotional weight of our ancestors’ actions. You’re born into it, and sometimes you confront it, sometimes you repress it. The film revolves around this awakened conscience and what you do with it.

The movie uses real video material from the 1990s, with shocking footage from Romanian orphanages. How did you find these images?
AB: On the internet, by chance. We found, for example, a harrowing piece, captured by Belgian TV and accessible on YouTube. We were teenagers when the Romanian revolution happened, and we grew up with those horrifying images, reports by Western journalists showing the abandoned children in orphanages. We were flooded by them, and at a certain point, we developed a kind of emotional immunity. People even started rejecting them, saying, “The foreigners only want to show our bad side.” There was a collective denial.

MP: It’s a denial that became part of our national psyche – this idea that “it wasn’t our fault”. But on some level, we all share a portion of the guilt. When we began our research for the film, we went back to these materials, reading about the adoptions and rewatching old reports.

So, the film challenges the official narrative – that Romanians were all victims under Ceaușescu?
AB: Somewhat, yes. After the revolution, we were quick to say: “Look what he did to us.” But when you listen to some of the witnesses, you realise how easily people painted themselves as victims even when they were complicit. There’s a woman in the footage who worked at an orphanage, who, instead of recognising the horrifying reality there, laments her own situation. That inability to admit one’s involvement even passively says a lot.

Y also shows a generational disparity – the older characters denying or justifying the past, and the younger ones trying to confront it. Was that intentional?
MP: Yes and no. It’s also about how ordinary people can become instruments in facilitating something monstrous. The older generation lived through it, but the younger one can’t fully understand the context. We discussed this with the actress playing the orphanage director – she initially saw her character as a villain. We told her: “You’re not evil; you genuinely believe you did good.” That makes her character far more disturbing.

AB: We didn’t want heroes. Olga, the main character, doesn’t become one. Mainstream cinema tends to soothe viewers with the idea that someone will fix things and order will be restored. But we’re tired of that. Everyone needs to take responsibility.

That sense of responsibility also appears in the conversation between Olga and her father, when he reminds her that their comfortable life stems from her grandmother’s actions. She’s like a Western bourgeois person who denounces colonialism but retains the privileges.
MP: That’s the impression we wanted to create. Her conscience awakens and she starts asking questions, but when it gets too uncomfortable, she puts it back to sleep. The final conversation is written almost like an internal monologue, the kind of mental dialogue we all have when we question our moral compass.

AB: A key question is whether harm can ever be undone. Can you really make amends for it? We talk about compensation and reparations, but is money an answer to such crimes? Some things, once broken, can’t be fixed – they carry on like a curse perpetuated through generations. Perhaps the only honest act is to take responsibility, to admit the guilt.

What about the title Y? Does it stand for the male chromosome?
MP: That’s one of the meanings, as the youngest person to inherit the guilt in the film is a boy. But also, “Y” sounds like “why” in English, which fits perfectly.

AB: It’s also the name of the “second wine” of a famous Bordeaux, made from the same grapes as the more prestigious one, but from the imperfect fruit. We loved the metaphor – how we like to think of ourselves as the “first wine”, when really, we’re the leftovers of previous generations. We all see ourselves as beautiful people, but maybe we are not in reality.