BLUE BANKS

Director’s statement

During my research for this feature I became interested in the way in which the spirit of the rural is changing. With the influence of media and labour migration, women in even the most remote parts of the world begin to mimic Western ways of living, thinking and desiring. This usually ends up creating tensions with their own reality. This is why the narrative of the story is told in the chronicle form, a form I based on contrast and not on confrontation or conflict.  The main inspiration for this project has been the Romanian South and its women, the place where I was born and raised and also the place I kept running away from till very recently. When I started the research I found myself in a very conflictual position: on one side as someone that belongs to that world and needs to protect it and on the other as somebody who looked down on it with prejudice. Working on this project has managed to reconciles the two positions.

Producer's statement

The idea of the project sprung from the need of showing a world in which feminism is a peculiar concept which is never on the table. For the ex Soviet countries, the rural areas are years away from the urban ones. If in the Western countries moving to the outskirts, suburban or rural areas are trending and show a higher life quality, for countries like Romania, where 47.2% of the population is living in the rural areas, Poland 39.4%, 28% in Hungary, 26% in Bulgaria, life is so much different for men and especially women there. Bringing to light the mentalities they are confronted with and their struggles for survival will show us a portrait of the women that go and work abroad leaving homes and children behind, returning later to a family they don’t know anymore. For the Western audience this movie might touch on an important contemporary question that needs to be addressed: where is the immigrant’s home and how does it look like?