The feature-length debut of young Romanian filmmaker Sebastian Mihăilescu was highly anticipated by the local industry. After all, his 2016 short film, Old, Luxurious Flat Located in an Ultra-Central, Desirable Neighborhood, an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story in the vein of the Romanian New Wave, had competed in the prestigious Pardi di Domani section of the Locarno Film Festival. In this sense, You Are Ceaușescu to Me comes across as a surprise, but one can feel the presence of a (critical and reflexive) preoccupation towards the means of fiction and moving images in this film, one that seems inspired both by Cristi Puiu, whom Mihăilescu named as a mentor of sorts in 2016, and Radu Jude. A combination that, at least on paper, might sound as unlikely as it may get, but that, in practice, transpires under the shape of a non-fictional hybrid which banks on performative techniques in order to question the ways in which history turns to fiction, turns to interpretation (rhetorically and performatively). Of course, the film also flirts (in an intervention belonging to the director, nonetheless) with Andrei Ujică’s 2010 The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu. A reference which might be read as the key towards Mihăilescu’s aesthetic and formal positioning, as an apparent counterweight – given that the latter’s feature heavily borrows both from docu-fiction and the participatory mode of documentaries – but which, at its core, transmits the very same sensation: that one can never really tell where reality ends and fiction starts, and vice-versa.

Flavia Dima

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Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.

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