06/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: The Romanian director spills the beans on his morally challenging first fiction feature, focusing on a stowaway who’s discovered on board a container ship sailing to America

After a career in journalism and several documentary features, Romanian director Mihai Mincan switches to fiction with To the North [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mihai Mincan
film profile], one of the rather rare Romanian films selected at the Venice Film Festival, in Orizzonti. The story is set in the mid-1990s, when a stowaway is discovered on board a container ship sailing to America. Here is what the director has to say about the film’s context, and its position on the concepts of “right” and “wrong”.

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Cineuropa: For years, you have dedicated yourself to documentary. Meanwhile, To the North is actually inspired by real events. What determined you to make a fiction film?
Mihai Mincan: The film is indeed “inspired” by real events, as is mentioned in the credits. My source of inspiration was the so-called “Maersk Dubai incident”, which I learned about in 2015. But the story of my film is a very fictionalised variation on those events – so fictionalised that there are only a few similarities concerning the space, the nationality of some of the characters and a Bible that becomes a bridge between them. I think that the need I felt to make a fiction feature was prompted by what I first felt when I learned about what happened then. The Bible and the religious aspect were of paramount importance to the story, but I was not at all interested in making a film about these aspects. A year later, in the spring of 2016, I came back to the story and wrote a first draft.

I wanted to make a film about the impossibility of communication, even when this communication is supposed to happen between people with similar ideals, people who hail from similar milieus. I wanted to make a movie about the fear one feels when one’s life is under another’s power. That is why the “real event” remained only as a mere connection with that moment in the past, only a tool for me to avoid the “once upon a time” approach.

Can we talk about the concept of good and evil in your film? Maybe it does have a hero, but does it really have a villain?
I put a lot of effort into avoiding these “good versus evil” or “hero versus villain” approaches. From my point of view, all of the characters are right in their own way. Maybe one may not agree with their beliefs, but that makes no dent in the legitimacy of those beliefs. As I was writing the screenplay, I always based the direction of the story not on the traditional question of “do you believe the character?”, but rather on “do you understand the character?” Every man in the film fights for his own survival and lets himself be guided by his own set of values that life has hammered into him. I am not at all a fan of moral relativism, but I think that today it’s getting more and more complicated to talk about right and wrong.

What is your opinion on the legal context that makes killing stowaways so difficult to punish?
It is very complicated to create a legal framework for murders where the victim is missing. It is difficult to prove it in a court of law. All of those stowaways thrown overboard in the middle of the ocean were poor people fleeing from their native countries, nurturing the dream of a better life. Their departure was in no way recorded officially, and more often than not, their relatives had no idea which boat they were on when they met their fate. Cynically speaking, it is quite easy for a captain to get rid of a stowaway, as it always comes down to a situation of “his word against theirs” (the latter being the crew or the victim’s family) and the financial resources of the shipping company, and the absence of a body can easily cause the case to be dismissed.

There are not many Romanian films with fewer lines actually in Romanian. Was making a film almost entirely in a foreign language an advantage or an issue for you?
It was definitely an advantage. Working with actors speaking in a language you don’t understand at all can lead to a certain anxiety, but it can also be incredibly liberating. When you don’t pay any attention to words, you are more present than ever. You feel the rhythm, and you can get lost in a basic emotion where you understand all that is being conveyed by the other person only by watching their eyes and gestures. There is something extremely pure here, as if you are rediscovering a form of communication that has been lost because of words.

Your protagonist runs a huge risk in order to get to America, but one reason to do so can be found in the terrible lack of opportunities that prevailed in Romania in the 1990s. Were you ever preoccupied by this aspect?
[In 1996], when the events presented in the film happened, I was a teenager, and some people I knew personally chose to leave the country in ways that, today, seem beyond crazy. They didn’t think about “opportunities”, at least not as we do today, when you work abroad “for a certain period, in that place, for that amount of money”. Back then, people left for what I think was more of a fantasy. America meant things we’d never had: Coca-Cola, hamburgers, the clothes, the music, that feeling of freedom. At that time, their expectations were far less concrete. You went off chasing a dream. This is what I’ve tried to convey with Dumitru, and I think this is the beginning of his conflict: he feels threatened only when his cherished fantasy is threatened.

What’s next for you as a director?
Another fiction film called Milk Teeth. All I can say is that it’s a coming-of-age story about a child who indirectly takes part in a horrible murder in the last few years of communism.