Lina Vdovîi can’t help but sigh when she is asked about how she kept the personal and professional sides of her life apart when she and her partner Radu Ciorniciuc were making their new film Tata, a world premiere September 8 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and sold by Autlook.
On the one hand, the documentary is a piece of investigative journalism, examining the exploitation and bullying of foreign workers in Italy. On the other, it’s a heartfelt and raw exploration of Vdovîi’s own family background. The man being so badly exploited is her own father. He is now the victim but when she was growing up in Moldova, he was violent and abusive toward her.
“OK…I was always struggling to navigate through these roles that I had,” she says of her status as a “daughter, niece and grandchild” and as a filmmaker. “My main goal was to be as authentic as possible.”
Early on, Vdovîi decided that the only way to ensure such a personal film would have a “larger relevance” was to be as honest as possible. “It was a continuing process of finding this balance.”
Vdovîi and Ciorniciuc, who co-directed the film, have worked together before, for example on Acasa My Home, about a family forced out of their rural existence and made to live in the city. As journalists, they’ve specialised in investigative stories in which they have reported on stories of exploitation and abuse, often those involving Romanian and Moldovan immigrant workers in western Europe.
When she received a distressed message from her father, Vdovîi realised he was in trouble.
“It was quite natural and normal for us to grab our camera, our hidden cameras, and to go there [to where the father was staying in Italy] to do something about it. We weren’t sure what at that stage, but it was quite natural for us to start documenting the process.”
For Ciorniciuc, this was the first time he had met his father-in-law. He hoped that perhaps he could be a “mediator” between Vdovîi and her father.
The duo filmed for a few years, from the summer of 2018 to 2020/21, before starting to approach funders. Their producer Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan was kept in the loop from the earliest stages of the project. When they first went to Hanka Kastelicova, VP and Executive Producer of Documentaries for HBO Max in Europe, they were pitching the film more as an investigative story than a personal one – but that gradually changed.
Inevitably, Covid slowed the project down but also gave the filmmakers time to re-think the project. Vdovîi decided she wasn’t going just to tell the story of her father as victim but that she would look into his chequered past as “a very authoritarian, severe and sometimes violent parent.”
“Lina bravely decided to dig deeper,” is how Ciorniciuc puts it.
The father has now watched the film. He and Vdovîi sat through an early cut together. “It was a very nice event. I watched it with my mum as well. At the beginning of the film, they were sitting on the couch apart from each other, in separate corners. At the end, they were together!”
This, then, has been a cathartic process for the entire family. Vdovîi hopes that it will help break the “vicious cycle, a toxic cycle” of male violence. By making the film, Vdovîi also feels she has come to understand her father and his behaviour as parent better. He was under intense pressure, working several jobs at once, trying to put bread on the table. It wasn’t easy for him to be the model dad.
“And now I know he grew up in an even harsher environment with a worse father than he was to us…understanding this helped me to see more nuances and the complexity of what happened to him.”
As a younger woman, Vdovîi had been almost completely estranged from her father. Making the documentary convinced her that “running away” from him wasn’t “healing the wounds from your past.” She was giving herself a chance to make peace with him.
“I can’t change him or my past but I can create a new model of family for ourselves and our little daughter,” Vdovîi reflects.
With Vdovîi and Ciorniciuc helping him, the father is able to build a very strong legal case against his abusive employer and to sue for unpaid wages. He seems remorseful for his previous behaviour toward his wife and children – but the film shows that he still has an anger within him.
“There are certain qualities that I really appreciate about him,” Ciorniciuc says of his father in law. “He’s trustworthy.” Ciorniciuc also acknowledges the sacrifices the father made for his family, working such punishing hours, living abroad and sending money home.
The father has changed aspects of his behaviour. He is no longer quite as interfering and as controlling as he used to be. “Lina managed to educate him over the last six years and now he is making quite a lot of effort.”
Lina, meanwhile, points out that many of her classmates and friends had similar experiences to her with “toxic masculinity, violence and this broken patriarchal system…it is very common in this part of the world but I am pretty sure that it’s not just specific to Moldova, Romania and Eastern Europe,”
In former Soviet countries, machismo is deeply embedded in everyday life. Men feel that their value lay in being dominant and not expressing emotion or showing weakness.
The film has a scene of the father talking with a priest who tells him that he has nothing to apologise about. Vdovîi was initially furious that the priest seemed to be ignoring his abusive behaviour. On reflection, she saw it as another sign of how entrenched old chauvinist attitudes had become. She hopes that the documentary will “function as a mirror” to other men who treat their wives and children in a harsh and authoritarian way.
Ciorniciuc, meanwhile, talks about the “despair and social depression” in the years after the fall of communism. This helped foster the culture of male violence that the film depicts. “It all starts with an honest reflection on yourself and with honest criticism,” he says of why men need to come clean with themselves.
