| Plot Summary |
My grandparents, Vasile and Ioana Bardea, are the protagonists of this documentary. They are peasants - plain and simple - and I spent many happy summers in my childhood on their farmstead in Posaga in a beautiful and, as yet, unspoilt valley in Transylvania in North West Romania. My grandfather is 80 years old. Every morning he wakes up at 5 o'clock, feeds his chickens and picks up his "grim reaper" scythe and climbs the hill behind his modest home to get to the field where he works until it gets dark. My grandfather's dream was to become a violinist. His father cruelly burnt his violins and sent him to work. Deep inside his soul, my grandfather remains a true artist. My grandmother believes strongly in God. My grandmother's dream was to live in a city, but that was never an option that her parents allowed her to take. Her education was cut short to be put to work on their smallholding and to carry on the family tradition. Now throughout the spring and summer months she lives in a wooden "hovel" on the high mountain pasture, tending her two cows and their calves, completely out of touch with the rest of the world. In this film, she forgets about her shyness as she urges a bull to service a reluctant young cow. She shows us what remains of her original hovel that I played in as a child that arsonists burnt to the ground without warning 2 years ago. Against their wishes and like many others in the village, their only daughter (my mother), escaped the peasant life of drudgery and married a doctor and moved far away. Now Vasile and Ioana are frightened for their future as they have no-one to look after them or to tend their already crumbling and decaying smallholding. My grandparents' story is the story of an entire nation. They represent Romania's last genuine peasant generation. These are the people who watched 3 political regimes -monarchy, and then communism and now "democracy" - come uninvited to impact on their lives. As my grandfather says in the film, "They all stole from us". Today the State hands out a combined monthly social security payment of 13 Euros on which they are both expected to survive. With the worldwide slump in farm prices, today their produce is worthless so they eat what they grow and live a pathetically frugal existence. I strongly believe that Romania will only be able to understand where it is headed if it also understands and respects its past. I hope that my film is a document addressed to all future generations in Romania, but also to all those in all countries who may have lost something precious as they embrace homogenized modern lifestyles.
Written by Ioana Joca
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