„The Distance between Me and Me” documentary directed by Mona Nicoară and Dana Bunescu and produced by Ada Solomon had the preview on February 28 in Bucharest and is ready to hit the Romanian theaters as of March 8. The documentary will also be aired by TVR public broadcaster, as it is co-producer.
The film about famous Romanian avant-garde poetess Nina Cassian’s life and work had its premiere last year within One World Romania festival.
Nina Cassian, known as an avant-garde poetess, translator, composer and illustrator, was born in Galati, eastern Romania, in 1924, to a Jewish family. At 16, she joined the Communist Youth organisation, still illegal at that time. After the communists came to power after 1945, Cassian was accepted by the regime, although communists used to call her work “decadent poetry”. Scared by that fierce criticism, she then turned to writing in the proletkult and socialist-realistic style. However, she soon began to despise the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.
Cassian traveled to the United States as a visiting professor in 1985. During her stay in America, a friend of hers, Gheorghe Ursu, was arrested and subsequently beaten to death by the Securitate communist police for possessing a diary. The diary contained several of Cassian’s poems which satirized the Communist regime and the authorities thought to be inflammatory. Hence, she decided to remain in the US, where she lived until her death in April 2014, at the age of almost 90.
The documentary „The Distance between Me and Me” reveals the life of Cassian as a life-and-death battle between „aesthetic” and „ethics” and how this fascinating female figure of the Romanian literature managed to preserve her inner candor and the childish faith in an utopian fairy tale.
A film about believes, art and power, the documentary is exploring the friction between the personal memory and the official archive. The film is featuring an almost nonagenarian Nina Cassian the last year when she was alive, talking from her apartment in New York, recalling her life and reciting poetry from her memory, which seemed to be intact after decades. Nina’s thoughts about her life are confronted with a rich archive of films, music, poetry, TV shows, private videos and documents from her Securitate file.
The film is, above all, about fighting one’s own past, about a prolific artist, boasting a „femme fatale” profile despite her physical ugliness, with a huge charisma and magnetism, with a tremendous flow of speech, whose masterpiece was not quite understood by her contemporaries, a woman ahead her times, loved and controversial at the same time, and who, despite her sometimes wrong choices, remained in history through her only faith…in the beauty of art.