To The North about a devout Christian Filipino sailor who decides to hide a Romanian stowaway onboard a transatlantic ship also screened in Orizzonti. The film is loosely based on a true story and it is a carefully and tightly crafted thriller that builds to a violent climax.
Milk Teeth on the other hand, while very loosely based on the phenomenon that a number of children vanished without explanation in the last years of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, the film moves back and forth between reality and dreams without any clear structure.
Mincan wrote the script for both films. Milk Teeth tells the story of Maria played by Emma Ioana Mogos, a ten-year-old girl, who is the last person to witness when her sister Alina disappears as she simply goes round the corner of the house to take out the rubbish. Torn apart by the loss, she tries to make sense of a new, terrifying reality. The film follows the struggle of Maria to find the courage to grow up. She also represents the lost generation of Romanian children that came of age during the transition from communism to capitalism giving the film another layer of meaning.
We experience all of this through the eyes of a child without any explanation of events and see her perception of both real events and imaginary fears. The evocation of the sometimes almost mystical world is greatly aided by the work of cinematographer George Chiper-Lillemark.
Another key theme of the film is the reconstruction of the lost world of the final years before the collapse of communism. The production has gathered many iconic items form the now lost period that show up prominently in the film.
Mincan has said that he got the idea for the film after reading a Romanian Communist Militia file from 1989, about the disappearance of an eleven-year-old girl from a small town. Over the years it became a coming-of-age story about the aftermath of a tragedy - a film about a young girl who tries to make sense of a confusing and cruel world that suddenly opens up before her eyes.
Mincan said that he had worked out a very careful script and shooting plan before he began the production but that soon after getting underway he realised that to capture the essence of the experience of a child trying to make sense of events she does not understand he would have to throw away his plans and approach the production from a much more improvisational way.
Click HERE for the FNE TV interview with the director.
Milk Teeth / Dinti de lapte (Romania, France, Denmark, Greece, Bulgaria)
Directed by Mihai Mincan
Main Cast: Emma Ioana Mogos, Marina Palii, Igor Babiac, Istvan Teglas
Produced by deFilm
Coproduced by Remora Films, Ström Pictures, StudioBauhaus, Screening Emotions
Supported by the Romanian Film Centre, the Romanian Office for Film and Cultural Investments (OFIC), the Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (France), the Danish Film Institute, the Bulgarian National Film Center, the Hellenic Film &Audiovisual Center - Creative Greece / National Recovery & Resilience Plan - Greece 2.0 - Co-productionWindow, ARTE Kino, Media Investment Communication, Creative Europe MEDIA, ERT SA, TorinoFilmLab Production Award & Green Filming Award, Cinema City, the Romanian Television, Avanpost, Radio Romania.
