Andreea Borțun
Writer / Director
Romania
Andreea Borțun is a Romanian writer/director. She is a film graduate of UNATC Bucharest and has studied philosophy at BARD College Berlin and Bucharest University. Andreea’s directorial debut, the short film “Blue Spring”, was selected in 2015 for the official competition of the 40th Toronto International Film Festival and her second short, “Love Locker”, won the Berlinale Talents & Canon Short Prize Award as well as the France 3 Award (Paris Courts Devant). She is the co-founder of Pustnik, an international screenwriters residency that takes place every year in Romania. She had her debut in theatre with a show directed by Neil LaBute and her first full-length play was part of Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2015. She has recently received development funding for her first feature, “Blue Banks”, and production funding for her newest short.
Project
Blue Banks
Malul vânăt
“Blue Banks” explores passages in the life of a woman not living, but struggling to survive. Lavinia is thirty, the single mother of a child suffering from a mild form of autism. Told in the course of four seasons, in the poor fields of the South the film shows Lavinia’s attempts of liberating herself from the patriarchal dependency she has grown up with, her falls and her constant failing at becoming independent. Once Lavinia’s abusive partner dies of an unexpected heart attack she finds herself free of any obligations. But she doesn’t know what to do with the freedom’s she’s been granted. She moves back with her son in her abandoned family home. She is left with debts, bound to her child and unable to receive social care or sell her family property. But she is independent for the first time in her life. However this scares Lavinia, throwing her into the arms of a silent depression and of a new man. Back from where she started, Lavinia seems to be living in a loop of dependency and struggle. The ending suggests her toil will live beyond the film, one other anonymous strive in a sea of plenty.
Photo Larisa Baltă
