The first feature film signed by Andreea Cristina Borțun, Malul Vânăt / A River's Gaze debuts in 7 international festivals
A River's Gaze / A River's Gaze, the first film in the trilogy about love in the countryside, signed by the director Andreea Cristina Borțun and the first Romanian project supported by the American actor of Romanian origin Sebastian Stan – as producer and financier-, enters the SMART 7 competition, a network of international festivals supported by the Creative Europe Program. The film is an anthropological drama that adopts an almost unique approach in Romanian cinema: the cast is made up of more than 60% non-professional actors from the villages where Andreea Cristina Borțun did the field documentation for six years (2017–2022), and the filming took place during four seasons, in order to capture the cycle of nature and rural life.
The film explores the tense emotional dynamics between Lavinia, an impulsive and insecure mother in love, and her 14-year-old son, Dani, in a village in southern Romania. Against the backdrop of westward migration and social transformations, Lavinia's dream of turning their home into a “palace” under bluer skies takes them through four seasons of approaches and rejections. Under the silent gaze of the river, in the slow rhythm of the valley, many things remain unsaid. An alternate red thread connects the lives of non-professional actors to their characters, often blurring the line between reality and fiction.
Andreea Cristina Borțun is a director, visual researcher and academic staff at the National University of Theater and Cinematography “IL Caragiale” (UNATC) in Bucharest. His film practice is grounded in anthropological research and explores, through a hybrid language between fiction and documentary, the sensory relationship between communities and their environment. His previous films have been selected at important festivals such as the Festival de Cannes (Quinzaine des Réalisateurs), the Toronto International Film Festival and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
“The story of the film has behind it a whole process of immersive documentation that I conducted for six years in the rural communities of southern Romania. For me, the use of artistic research tools borrowed from anthropological field work came as something intuitive in the first instance. It seemed natural and necessary to take part and get to know the world that interested me closely. I knew the rural south because I had grown up there, but I had moved away from it. The amateur actors re-approached this space and broadened my frame of understanding. They bring themselves first and foremost, and that something very real remains over time. This aspect of hybridity between what may seem documentary, but which is at the same time a product of fiction, is something that interests me as part of my long-term artistic practice.
The process of working on the film's narrative was also an open one. I worked with what I call an elastic dramaturgy, which allowed me to be able to give freedom to the actors to improvise within a predetermined framework, but also to be able to experiment with various forms of narrative in the montage. Years of field research, discussions with local women who shared their life stories with me, especially the defining encounter with one of them – a model for Lavinia's interiority -, I hope will ensure a fair representation of today's Romanian countryside, which, after all, is home to half of Romania's population“, says director and screenwriter Andreea Cristina Borțun.
Actor Sebastian Stan told Variety about his involvement in this project: “I have been a great admirer of Romanian films for a very long time, impressed by their 'raw' authenticity and their unfiltered, fearless perspective on life. When Andreea told me about the story, I was immediately drawn in. I understood the characters, their journey, the inner struggle against the primal instinct with which we are born and, in particular, the complex mother-son relationship on which the story is based. The fact that I was raised by a single mother, that I moved and having lived in three different countries from a young age, with my mother determined to provide me with security and a better life outside of communist Romania, and my inability to understand then the sacrifice and profound impact of it all, this story spoke to me on a deeply personal level.”
The cast of the film includes: Mihaela Subtîrică, Ștefan Costea, Vasile (Digudai) Pavel, Emanuel Ivan, Ion Rusu, Ion Ciocârlan, Iulian Postelnicu, Petronela Grigorescu, Dorina Stan, Nicolae Drăgulin, Nicu Mihoc, Eliza Bercu, Cezar Antal, Maria Junghiețu, Dana Voicu and Cătălina Mustață.
Malul Vânăt / A River's Gaze is written and directed by Andreea Cristina Borțun. The producers are Gabi Suciu, Jean-Laurent Csinidis, Ales Pavlin, Andrej Stritof, Sebastian Stan, Andreea Cristina Borțun, Adrian Pădurețu and Vlad Rădulescu, and the executive producers are Alexandra Tînjală and Claudiu Boboc. The director of photography is Laurențiu Răducanu, the scenography is signed by Lulu Petrescu, the costumes by Sonia Constantinescu, the editing by Tudor D. Popescu and Andreea Borțun. The sound engineers are Jean-Michel Tresallet and Maxime Gavaudan, the sound design is by Florent Klockenbring, the sound mixing by Frédéric Bielle, the original music is composed by Cosmin Postolache, and the coloring is by Michael Derrossett.
“I strongly believe in film as a process that brings people together at every stage of production and that can have meaning for the communities in which it comes to life. Together with Andreea, we chose to go beyond conventional production models and limitation to some logistical exchanges and work in a framework as ethical as possible in relation to the communities we went to and chose to portray on screen. Instead of intervening as a disruptive external element that changes the course natural to those people's lives, we wanted to work close to them, to understand their ecosystem and to take care of them in the challenges brought by each season. We discovered their passions and interests, but also the complexities of the place fragile, often unspoken, between the Roma and non-Roma communities, which the film approaches nuancedly, seeking to overcome stereotypes. We wanted to bring to the screen interpersonal relationships in all their authenticity, complexity, intimacy and contradictions.” says Gabi Suciu, producer.
SMART7 is an innovative network of seven prestigious international festivals, Reykjavik IFF (Iceland), IndieLisboa IFF (Portugal), Thessaloniki IFF (Greece), Vilnius IFF Kino Pavasaris (Lithuania), FILMADRID IFF (Spain), Transilvania IFF (Romania) and New Horizons IFF (Poland), which have joined forces to support and promote a brave, innovative and transgressive European cinema. The initiative aims to increase the visibility of emerging European films, facilitate their international circulation and create dialogue bridges between filmmakers, festivals and audiences. The winner of the competition will be announced during the Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Greece), during which the second project of the trilogy (The Life and Times of Ion G), under development, received the ARTE Cinema award in 2025.
Malul Vânăt / A River's Gaze is a Romania-France-Slovenia co-production of the production companies Atelier de Film, Films de Force Majeure, Perfo, TETA, Forest Film, Avanpost, co-financed by Eurimages, the Creative Europe MEDIA Program, the National Center of Cinema, Aide aux Cinemas du Monde – Center National du Cinema et de L'image Animee – Institut Francais, Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, in partnership with the Center National du Cinéma, Slovenian Film Centre, Mediacom Romania, Mindshare Media, BRD Groupe Societe Generale, United Media Services and Jidvei.
The project was developed within the LIM – Less is More (2019), First Films First (2020) and Budapest Debut Film Forum (2020) programs. Selected as a project in development within Cinelink Sarajevo (2020), Venice Production Bridge (2021), Les Films de Cannes a Bucarest work-in-progress (2024), TIFF Industry Days (2021). The film project also won the Transilvania Pitch Stop Award (2021).
The movieThe Hunted Bank / A River's Gaze will be seen in theaters nationwide from July 3, distributed by Follow Art Distribution.
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