Andrei Cohn on ‘Holy Week’: “What interested me was this vicious cycle of hatred that we don’t know how to break”
Open Sesame, gate of aesthetic experiments: more and more Romanian names seem to make it into the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival in recent years, with Andrei Cohn's Holy Week being the only Romanian film in this year's selection. A free adaptation of the 1889 novella An Easter Torch by Romanian author Ion Luca Caragiale, Cohn's film shies away from the subjectivity of the original's psychological drama and migrates to an area somewhere between literary naturalism and the Milletian vein of French painting – a world as beautiful in its rural simplicity as it is tainted by prejudice and simmering conflicts, witness to a vicious and endless cycle of hatred, as the director describes it. In the moral and paranoid decay of Jewish innkeeper Leiba Zibal, after being threatened by his help Gheorghiță, Cohn distances himself from the subjectivity of the novella's dreamlike fantasies, addressing the crucial yet elusive question: when do good people lose their kindness?
Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.
