Costume Design
In a small village close to the mountains, Mariana and Puiu are a young family with two children: Carmen and Mircea. One morning, the mother and the ten year-old daughter leave for Bucharest, having a hospital as their destination. One doctor alone, Sitaru, believes that Carmen, who can no longer smile, stands any chances at survival. He believes he can perform a miracle and save Carmen's life. Struggling for her daughter, abandoned by almost everybody she trusted, Mariana discovers she is pregnant. After dr. Sitaru operates on the little girl, in a risky manner, Carmen begins to feel increasingly worse. Without any hope, Mariana leaves the hospital and rushes to take Carmen home: while one life ends, another one begins to flicker.
Costume Design
When the Soviet Army marched into Romania in 1944, a part of the Romanian population went “into the mountains” – a diverse assortment of nationalists and fascists, liberals, apolitical farmers and members of the middle-class, who were affected by the Communists’ expropriations. Over a thousand armed resistance groups took refuge in the inaccessible forests of the Carpathian Mountains where they waited in vain for the support of the Western Allies. One of them was led by Ion Gavrilă-Ogoranu, who managed to remain undetected until 1976 when he was arrested. This film depicts the daily existence of this group. It tells the story of a struggle that became an end in itself, as the enemy was constantly in pursuit and arrest meant torture and often liquidation. Hungry and emotionally withdrawn, the group of young men got entangled in a partisan war that could not be won, lost in the landscape of the South Carpathians, accompanied by a vigilant secret police, the Securitate.
