Actor Sebastian Stan financed the film “A River’s Gaze”, which brings a less stereotypical perspective on Romanian villages. Directed by Andreea Cristina Bor?un , the film explores the complex relationship between a single mother and her teenage son, amid labor migration, and offers a candid approach to the realities of rural life: “Many families are divided and this brings with it anger and frustration, issues that were very clearly shown to us in the fall of 2024, during the presidential elections, and that we should not close our eyes to or forget about,” says director Andreea Bor?un in an interview with the HotNews audience.
“A River’s Gaze” will be available in cinemas starting at the end of June, and throughout the summer it will be screened in several Romanian villages.
“I think many of us experience this feeling of hostility towards the worlds we come from. And I think it would do us all good to make a little peace with them,” says Andreea Cristina Bor?un.
The director followed her own idea when she began working on her first feature film, “A River’s Gaze” , the first Romanian project in which Sebastian Stan was involved as a producer and financier. “I’ve wanted to act in a Romanian film for a very long time. I tried, but it didn’t materialize, but I realized that I could also contribute from behind the camera. Andreea’s script resonated with me on a personal level,” the Oscar-nominated actor said in an interview for Variety .
The film takes us to rural southern Romania, into the life of a single mother, Lavinia (Mihaela Sub?iric?), and the relationship she has with her 14-year-old son, Dani. As she seeks to renovate her house and earn money, with the intention of leaving for the West to work, the dynamic between her and the teenager shifts and transforms, as each of them perceives and offers love in different ways.
“I spent almost three weeks in the homes of people I didn’t know”
“The Red Shore” is the first film in a trilogy centered on rural love, and the production was based on a six-year documentary process that Bor?un conducted in rural communities in southern Romania. Filmed over four seasons in villages in Teleorman, C?l?ra?i, Giurgiu and Dâmbovi?a, the film has a cast made up mainly of non-professional actors.
Born in Alexandria, Andreea Bor?un spent her childhood in the village of Piatra in Teleorman County. She says the idea for the project came to her in 2015, while she was in New York. At the time, she felt that the rural world of the south, where she comes from, was invisible or underrepresented in cinema and she wanted a fair representation of it.
The motivation also came from a personal tension between the desire to distance herself from that environment and the need to explore and understand it more deeply through film. “So I felt that a fair look at that world was missing. I wanted to somehow do it justice. And I was trying to get myself outside of the prejudices I had about it, even though it had shaped me,” she explains.
“A River’s Gaze” has a hybrid structure, between fiction and anthropological documentary. The director tells how she began the documentation in 2017, without knowing what she was doing, but with the aim of starting something preparatory for her first feature film.
“I made my way to three villages where I had never been before, the first time in 2017. I spent almost three weeks in the homes of people I didn’t know. During this first research, I talked a lot with the people in the village – I wanted to capture both the voices of ordinary villagers and institutions. I had these dialogues on the street, in taverns, on street benches, in offices, on farms,” ??Bor?un confesses.
She didn’t film anything then, but she collected many recordings and an entire notebook full of “daily observations related to how communities function, their specificities of expression, their patterns of thought,” along with life stories that stuck in her mind and her own interpretations of what she had observed.
“Later in 2018 and 2019, after meeting Lavinia (the one who inspired the interiority of the main character) I decided that the subject would focus on the story of a woman, against the backdrop of a rural world in constant flux due to waves of labor migration in Western Europe.”
It was also then that she wanted to expand the project, so together with her colleagues (Brîndu?a Nastas?, Claudiu Popescu, Lauren?iu R?ducanu, Tudor Popescu, Leti?ia ?tef?nescu and Roxana Bain) she worked on two multimedia installations that she presented in Bucharest and across the country.
“I designed some video materials, a series of photographs and written testimonials, as well as an audio installation. It was one of the first exhibitions of the Scena 9 Residency, where we also organized a debate to which some of the women who appear in the first installation in 2018 were invited. At that time, I felt that the topic could be relevant to more people than I would have thought,” he says.
The lucid emotional intelligence of village women
Through the central character of Lavinia, the film also focuses on the inner world of the women in the village. Andreea spoke to them and says that many of the women she spoke to wanted to talk.
“To put into words something that had been trapped inside them for a long time. Thoughts and life stories that they might not have dared to tell even to those closest to them. It was a confessional process. […] I found it interesting how it took a room and an unknown person for them to open up.”
There’s still this fear of showing yourself in your vulnerability to another woman, of closing that distance, because there’s a fear of betrayal. But once they opened up, I found it fascinating how clearly these women told their inner lives.
There’s a lucid emotional intelligence there, showing a complexity that can often go unnoticed. Because no one asks them what they feel, what they think, what they think about their stories, about the world they live in. Moreover, beyond the stories that often repeated the same pattern of an unhappy married life, the women I spoke to were deeply resilient. “What do we do? Let’s move on!” There’s something in the simplicity of this outdated expression that really has an honest power behind it.”
“Many families are divided and this brings with it anger and frustration”
Scene from “The Blue Shore”. PHOTO: Personal archive
“The Blue Shore” explores the thoughts and universe of a village woman, but it also talks about the sacrifices a mother makes, sometimes without them having the desired effects. The theme of love between Lavinia and Dani, her son, is not something that came per se from the field research, says Andreea. It took shape naturally, she adds, during the development of the narrative.
“I don’t think the way the two love each other is specifically related to the world they come from – I think many of us are deluded into thinking that we only show our love through what we do, while forgetting to be relationally present in the dynamic of love. And this also comes from the fear of openness, from the lack of habit of talking about what we feel.”
At the same time, Lavinia wants a better life and sees going abroad as an almost inevitable solution. Speaking of the phenomenon of migration in the lives of people from vulnerable environments and its effects on relationships and those left behind at home, the director speaks both of the consequences it causes and of the fact that it is still a very present reality.
“Many families are divided and this brings with it anger and frustration, issues that were made very clear to us in the fall of 2024, during the presidential elections, and that we must not close our eyes to or forget. The pain is still there. The absence of parents “raises” children with many emotional gaps, villages are metamorphosing their identities or are already depopulated.
The story written by Andreea Bor?un also had the objective of bringing a world that is not sufficiently represented to the big screen. “And when it comes with a series of stereotypes that only caricature or simplify it. So, although it appears little in films, when it does happen it is done without a sense of responsibility, by authors who continue to look down on it, often superficially and somehow tributary to a political trend that feels artificial for the sake of ‘being in step with the times’.”
“A film about the rural world of the South had to be told through the eyes of the locals”
Andreea Bor?um together with cinematographer Lauren?iu R?ducanu. PHOTO: Adi Bulboac?
Speaking of the fact that she worked mostly with people who are not actors, the director confesses that the choice came very early, right from the documentary phase.
“The world of a film is, to me, the starting point for everything – for the theme, for the subject matter, for the casting concept, for the language and visual grammar of the film. So a film about the rural world of the South had to be told through the people of the place.”
A year before filming, he made the decision that the lead actress would be a professional, and as for the non-professional actors, he says they inevitably brought themselves into the process.
“I think that brings a lot to the film. In some cases we integrated their life stories into the narrative, in others they molded themselves into the characters’ stories. But perhaps what surprised me the most was the passion, dedication, and discipline they showed.”
As for the character Dani (?tefan Costea), the casting process lasted a year and began with a series of theater workshops in schools in villages in Teleorman and C?l?ra?i. Andreea received a photo of him from his teacher.
Sebastian Stan is very attached to the project and resonated strongly with the story, especially since he also has his own memories with his mother, with whom he left the country when he was only 8 years old.
“At the heart of the story is this very specific and intimate relationship between a mother and a son growing up in Romania, under particular circumstances, which I feel the rest of the world doesn’t see much of. I had my own experience with my mother growing up there and leaving the country. I felt like there were things that really resonated with me, and that was great, because it motivated me to want to get more involved in helping her shape this vision,” he says in the interview with Variety.
Andreea says she came to collaborate with him through a mutual friend. After seeing the last short film Andreea directed (no. “When Night Meets Dawn”), the two met for a discussion, and from there things took a natural course, as the director says.
“Of course, it was important to have Sebastian by our side, especially since he believed in the project until the last stage of the film. His very delicate way of getting involved and also the openness and availability he had, whether when we were talking about editing drafts, festivals or distribution, seem to me to be very rare qualities for someone of his notoriety. I constantly felt that he respected my process and that he did not come with any type of intrusion. He always left me space, even prioritizing me in the discussions I had with various reporters and he came to meet me with an encouraging spirit when I inevitably went through difficult moments during the filming.”
In the interview Andreea gave to Variety, alongside Sebastian Stan, the interviewer was surprised that a village child had a phone. We asked the director if she believes there is still a simplified or outdated perception of rural Romania from the outside.
“I think we are still affected by this type of perspective, not only in terms of Eastern Europe, but especially the Global South and indeed all the territories that we have long exoticized (and when I say we, I mean the white population of Western Europe or North America). I don’t think our film has the power to fight the way centuries of traditions have worked in us. But it can bring us to a human ground zero, common to all of us,” she says.
For a long time, she adds, she liked to believe that a film could produce positive changes on a social level, but today she believes that, in addition to the film, “there must be a lot of parallel discussions, projects branching out from the film’s theme must appear (as I have been doing for some time with most of my films – installations, talks, screenings in alternative spaces, etc.), which should accompany it and thus reach as diverse an audience as possible. The fact that I am not sure if it can change perceptions, however, only comes from a pragmatic spirit. Of course, I would like this to happen.”
Cinema’s responsibility to authentically reflect life
At the end of the discussion, I turned to Lavinia, the film’s protagonist, a strong but not idealized woman. I was curious if Andreea feels there is a greater need for such characters in Romanian cinema, real women, beyond stereotypes, and the importance of the audience being able to identify with them.
The director firmly says that there is a need for such characters in the film. “It seems to me that cinema functions not only as a mirroring of the worlds it represents. It is a boomerang-like mirroring, if you will; a reflection that returns to the surface in which the image was seen reflected. Or in this return of the image back to those whom the image tried to reflect, lies, I believe, the great stake and also the responsibility.
Because representations of ourselves change our perceptions and understandings of how we think and live our lives. They act in reverse mimetically. And when our images are simplified on screen, I think we run the risk of living our lives simplified. So both in what I do in my projects and in working with students at the Film Faculty at UNATC, I constantly put this at the forefront. It is a responsibility that we have as filmmakers and I think we must take it very seriously. Because it has consequences for the way the world looks and the times we live in,” she concludes.