Women on Women in Contemporary Romanian Documentary Film

Guy Standing (2016) observes how in Eastern Europe, the post-1989 neoliberal order determined the working class to morph into what he names the precariat. This newly formed segment of society has to adapt to forever changing market imperatives in order to survive. Concomitantly, the Romanian state apparatus abruptly mutated from an overwhelming patriarchal structure into an all-out absent one (Bucur and Miroiu 252), thus making it more difficult for women to manage both patriarchally imposed roles and to find a workplace. Women filmmakers like Ana Căpățână-Juller (Aici…adică acolo Here… meaning there, 2012) and Teodora Mihai (Waiting for August, 2014) decide to turn their cameras onto women characters engaged in a struggle for survival. Both filmmakers deal with the same theme, the lives of children who have to raise themselves, as their parents have gone abroad in order to gain better incomes than in Romania. Working with Sybille Krämer’s “second person model of witnessing,” where testimony is associated with concepts such as social interaction manifested through trust and authority (Krämer 34), I will examine how the two filmmakers particularly engage with their subjects and the differences between two directorial perspectives: one that approaches reality from a top down perspective, while the other is enmeshed with the characters in the historical world.