ÎNTRE REVOLUȚII (Between Revolutions) is a film made exclusively from archival material, which mirrors the lives and destinies of two women—university colleagues and friends, one from Romania and the other from Iran— each living in two patriarchal societies.
It is a hybrid film that mixes archival footage, real documents and fictional elements, with the correspondence between two women at its core. The text of the letters is written by Lavinia Braniște, one of the most talented Romanian contemporary writers, inspired by both documents from the Secret Police and the poems of two important women writers from Romania and Iran—Nina Cassian and Forugh Farrokhzad, respectively.
I started working on this film more than three years ago, after reading a study about the foreign students living in Romania during the communist period. I was mostly interested in the people who came from the Middle East to study in a closed country like Romania at the end of the ‘70s and the beginning of the ‘80s. During those years, Romania had a policy of openness towards countries that were part of the non-aligned movement, encouraging the enrollment of foreign students in exchange for economic and infrastructure projects that involved Romanian workers and engineers.
I wanted to know more about my mother's routine, about her hopes and dreams, about all the hardships a woman had to endure at that time.
In addition to the general aspects, I was also interested in the personal stories. I talked at length with my mother about her student years. She studied medicine in the late ‘70s. She showed me photographs from her student years, we spoke about politics, daily life, and her colleagues from other countries. As a communist country, so different from the capitalistic, Western societies, I was always curious how Romania was perceived by an outsider during those years. Besides this, I wanted to know more about my mother's routine, about her hopes and dreams, about all the hardships a woman had to endure at that time.
I was born in 1979, the year of the Iranian revolution, and I was ten years old when the revolution in my country happened, an event that I watched live on TV with my parents. These two events represented for me historical landmarks of a sort; I still believe that the revolution against the Shah's dictatorship in Iran and against the Ceaușescu regime in Romania are some of the most important political events of the 20th century. All these things together gradually built up to what is now ÎNTRE REVOLUȚII, a film that mixes politics with poetry, intimate stories with state-controlled propaganda, letters with archival material.
For me ÎNTRE REVOLUȚII is a film about a recent past, which reverberates very strongly with our current reality. It is a film that presents a subjective, feminine history of two countries and societies that experimented with different political systems, an Islamic and Communist one, in which people were gradually crushed by the repressive political apparatus. It is a film that resonates with the recent events in Iran, where women are fighting again for their rights, just as they did in 1979. Their cry now, even if not present in the film, expresses what Zahra and Maria also want: “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi!” – “Women, Life, Freedom!”
Vlad Petri
