Having risen to fame in 2016 at Cannes, where he bagged Un Certain Regard’s FIPRESCI Prize with Dogs [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Bogdan Mirica
scheda film], Romania’s Bogdan Mirică – who also directed the Shadows series for HBO, among other works – shares a few insights into his project One Hand Jesus (penned by the director himself and produced by fellow Romanians Ioana Lascăr and Radu Stancu on behalf of deFilm), which won the Eurimages Award at the Co-Production Village, unspooling within the 17th Les Arcs Film Festival (see the news).

Cineuropa: What is One Hand Jesus about?
Bogdan Mirică: It’s the story of two generations, a grandson and his senile grandfather who was once a priest, who set out in search of a suspected serial killer. The grandfather claims to know this killer who’s reported to live in the mountains, so they head off on a Don Quixote-style quest to track him down. The story unfolds in the late ‘90s, because it’s inspired by my life, by my family and by my grandfather who developed Alzheimer’s when I was 15. So I wanted to be as honest as possible and stay faithful to the facts. The setting will be north-west Romania, in Moldova, on the Ukrainian border, a region mainly composed of hills and mountains, and dotted with widely dispersed villages. But you also find some huge uninhabited areas there. So it’s quite a wild and rugged place.

Was the criminal case in the film inspired by real events?
Yes. It happened two years ago. There was an old man kidnapping young female hitch-hikers. It caused a huge scandal and national trauma in Romania, because of the way the authorities managed the situation: they were highly incompetent, incredibly stupid and pretty cynical. It proved to me, to us, to wider society, that the system is broken, that people are broken and that most of them seem to be lacking in moral fibre. I wanted to combine this national trauma with my grandfather’s story, because when he was a priest in his village, he was also a bit of a vigilante. Every time someone had a problem, they’d go to him to fix it. So, obviously, when I read the story about these girls, I wondered what my grandfather would have done if he’d found himself in this situation, whether he’d have taken the law into his own hands. So, I took these two major events, 30 years apart from one another, and I placed them side by side.

You seem to be drawn to mixed genres...
I’m a big fan of genre film, it’s true. But what made me bring these two ideas together was the feeling I had when I read these girls’ story. I felt that, in Romania, as an individual, especially if you belong to a certain social class, there’s no-one there to support you, to speak on your behalf, to defend you, etc. It made me really angry, and of course, when we’re frustrated by a situation, we start to ask what we’d do in that position. Then I remembered my grandfather and his attitude towards these kinds of social injustices. So it was really easy to link the two together, because you get the impression that there’s a huge void when it comes to authority. Whereas my grandfather had a lot of authority within his small community. Sometimes, I’d like there to be more people like him, someone to act as sheriff or a godfather. In this particular case, it’s obviously more a question of poetic justice than legal justice. Because what the characters do isn’t necessarily legal. But when no-one acts or reacts, that’s the best you can do.

When do you plan to shoot the film?
In two years’ time, because this year I’m going to shoot another feature film about a filmmaker trying to find his personality and escape his father’s shadow, because the latter is the best actor in history. I hope to shoot One Hand Jesus in 2027.