Discussing his new feature doc Tooth and Nail, which he co-directed with Mihai Gavril Dragolea and which has been screening in Documentary Competition at Krakow this week, Romanian documentary maker Radu Mocanu can’t help but invoke the spirit of Charlie Chaplin. The famous screen comedian and “tramp” famously observed that the same incident that seems hilarious in long shot is tragic when you witness it up close.
“If you have a guy on the street and he is walking on a banana, if you see him fall in a close shot, you will see his pain – you will see the tragedy of the action. But if you see it in a wide shot, it will be comical and you will laugh,” Mocanu notes.
“Our way of dealing with issues [in Romania] is a tragic-comical way,” agrees Dragolea. “We have a saying that you laugh and you cry…we didn’t search for the humour but the humour was just there for us to uncover with our camera.”
Reality, they both point out, can be funny and sad, especially when you live and work in Romania.
This is their second film together, following on from Golden Robot (2015), about a female boxing champ from a very tough background (she was abandoned and institutionalised as a kid) coming towards the end of her career. “We met through a common friend. I am a bit younger than Radu,” Dragolea remembers.
Back in 2019/2020, Mocanu had been working with Greenpeace Romania at a time when there was a grassroots movement against illegal logging, which was becoming a huge business.
In the new film, Dragolea and Mocanu follow charismatic environmental activist Tiberiu Boșutar as he tries to stop this illicit process in Romania’s forests. (The documentary was originally going to be called Chasing Stumps).
The two directors’ work together on the project had a inauspicious start. In 2021, the filmmakers and subject Tiberiu were badly beaten up in the woods by 12 men with axes.
This is a classic observational documentary in which the filmmakers “discover” the story as they go along. At first, they were filming with several different activists, “people who fight against a force that is bigger than them but they also have this passion.”
There was no intention of making Tiberiu the main protagonist. “But at some point we stuck with him because we got into this beating, this fight in the forest,” Mocanu remembers. “This event brought us together.”
It’s a horrific incident in which the directors have their equipment smashed, lose almost all their footage; Mocanu is so badly beaten up that his memory goes and Tiberiu himself is forced to strip by the thugs to humiliate him. The thugs then tell the police the absurd story that the only reason they made him undress was to “sexually please him.”
Four years on, the filmmakers are philosophical about the failure of the authorities to punish their attackers.
“There is injustice to it. You feel it. But it is something that somehow I am used to,” says Mocanu. “I didn’t expect at all to have justice done. After the assault, I knew how things would roll out. Even if we were filming and we took a lawyer to represent us, I knew in the back of my head that the outcome would be the outcome you see in the film. I know how things roll out in my country!”
Besides, he adds, for the authorities, the fact some filmmakers were beaten up in a forest was “not a big deal.” Such violence is depressingly commonplace in contemporary Romania.
“I think we are just happy that it didn’t happen to us, to be killed,” Dragolea adds.
On the scale of global injustice, illegal logging in Romania may rank relatively low. The same banned practices go on elsewhere, including in the UK. Nonetheless, forest “mafia” types have been involved in “massive theft” over the years, getting rich at the expense of the environment. They’ve become wealthy enough to finance political parties at the regional level and to build themselves “extravagant houses and properties.” Then there are the small-timers who’ll steal “one or two trees” without realising the damage they’re doing.
In the movie, Tiberiu is an unlikely hero. He’s an ex-businessman who used to work in the wood industry himself but eventually turned whistle-blower and eco-activist.
“He got lots of press attention. Media outlets from Europe and Romania would go and consult him during their reports. The police also used him…”
Since the film was completed, Tiberiu has joined the populist, right-wing nationalist party AUR, but at the time the documentary was being shot, he didn’t seem to care about party politics.
“Somehow he got into this party, but I wouldn’t say he has an ideology. He says that he just used his platform to push forward his agenda, stopping the illegal woodcutting and so on.”
Tooth and Nail is the title of the documentary but could equally well be used to describe how hard the filmmakers have had to fight to complete their movie. “It’s a harsh reality being a filmmaker in Romania,” Dragolea reflects on the challenges he and his partner have often faced in securing backing for his work.
The two filmmakers began production “with no money” but eventually secured support from the state film fund. They had Bucharest-based Manifest Film as producers.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is now championing the film. The hope is that it will screen both at more festivals and in schools and online, awakening audiences to the corruption and environmental havoc being caused by the wood smugglers.
Claudia Sirbulescu’s Culoar Films will be releasing the documentary in Romanian cinemas in the autumn. (This is the company that also handled the release of last year’s Estonian crowd pleaser, Smoke Sauna Sisterhood).
