Andreea Valean
Writer-director
Romania
In 2021, co-producer and writer for the Slovenian film BIRMA! and producer-writer-director for the short DOWN WITH HITLER! DOWN WITH ANTONESCU!. 2018, director, writer and producer of the short PLAY! (Cairo Film Festival, Independent European Film Festival Paris). IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE which was based on her play, won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale in 2010. THE WAY I SPENT THE END OF THE WORLD, a film that she wrote and produced, was selected for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes 2006. Two years earlier, the short film TRAFFIC, for which she wrote the screenplay, was awarded with the Palme d’Or.
Her plays have been staged in Croatia, Serbia, Sweden, Italy, USA, UK, Poland. She is also a theatre and opera director at the Odeon Theatre, the National Opera Theatre, the National Jewish Theatre in Bucharest.
She holds a master’s degree in Sociology from the Bucharest University, a master’s degree in Theatre Directing and now is a doctoral student in Theatre Studies at UNATC, Bucharest.
Project
A Miracle will happen
In Bucharest in 1940, Max, a young avant-garde theatre director, does everything possible and impossible to get the censorship commission to approve the Barașeum, a theatre where all the Jewish artists purged from Bucharest’s artistic institutions can find work. After receiving this approval, in order to keep the theatre open and save the Jewish artists from deportation to the concentration camp, Max has to fight censorship, the terror of anti-Semitic laws and the whims of the Nazi audience. With the support of Romanian artists and the talent of Jewish ones, he succeeds.
The comedic virtuosity on stage will have a permanent counterpoint off stage in the atrocities of history that affected and nearly extinguished the Jewish population.
Based on true events.
