It’s late Monday afternoon. Romanian director Sebastian Mihăilescu is returning home after the day’s shoot on his debut dramatic feature, Double Happiness, a surrealist yarn about a man who wakes up and discovers his penis is missing.
Twenty four hours before, Mihăilescu was in Portugal having made a flying visit there for the Doclisboa shared world premiere of his documentary You Are Ceausescu To Me, for which he recruited actors in their teens and early 20s to play the role of future dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the mid-1930s, when he was still a young man.
Mihăilescu doesn’t want to go through his front door because he knows his pet dogs, who haven’t seen him for a day or two, will go wild. He needs to complete the interview with Business Doc Europe first.
In You Are Ceausescu To Me, the director offers a very different image of the notorious Romanian leader (executed on camera by his own people on Christmas Day 1989) to the one we are accustomed to seeing. This is Ceausescu long before he became a man of power.
“For me, the starting premise was Ceausescu being such an icon, like Mao, a pop idol almost, for Andy Warhol…it is such a false image of him.”
Mihăilescu was determined not to make an archive-driven documentary. He wanted to cover a period in his subject’s life “where there were no videos.” In the 30s, according to the files on him kept by the secret police, Ceausescu was considered “unimportant.” He was small fry, a communist agitator known for his aggression.
The director was fascinated by what he calls “the roots of evil.” When did Ceausescu begin to change and turn into the monster of history he became?
At the same time, Mihăilescu was playing with the conventions of cinema and with the idea that the director too can turn into a dictator. “It’s like a microcosmos which reflects this larger historical scale.”
Another goal was to explore how aware younger Romanians (the “Tik Tok generation”) were about their own history. The young performers featured in the documentary, aged between 15 and 22, come from every class and background. They have different temperaments too. Some are very ambitious. Some are more self-effacing.
Mihăilescu himself is 38. He describes filmmaking as his second career having started out as a computer scientist. He switched directions around 10 years ago, embracing cinema. “I thought I was a mediocre [computer] engineer and I wanted really to fulfil my potential. I wanted to become an architect or a painter. I had talent, I think, for drawing and I loved art a lot. I loved photography and I loved writing. And I was a cinephile. Somehow, film combined these skills all together…”
Back in Romania after working abroad, the budding director studied under renowned Romanian auteur Cristi Piuu, best known for The Death Of Mr Lazarescu (2005). “He was my teacher, my mentor.”
The chance to make You Are Ceausescu To Me came after he won a competition. He shot it over 10 days. That said, Mihăilescu had already directed various shorts which have screened on the festival circuit at venues ranging from Locarno in Switzerland to the MoMA in New York.
Back in 1989, when Ceausescu and his wife Elena met their grisly ends, the director was six years old. He may have been young but he has vivid memories of the period. “My father and my grandfather were in the army. My father was guarding a hospital, a military hospital. The Securitate [the secret police] was firing against the army. I remember my mother being afraid he would be shot…I remember this paranoia.”
His nagging worry is that “this could happen again.” With rising poverty, inflation and increases in energy prices, a new dictator like Ceausescu could easily re-emerge.
As for the new film in which the main character loses his penis, Mihăilescu suggests that this isn’t as outlandish as it might sound. “It’s surrealistic but the premise is that I can arrive at some truth by starting with something surreal. I am working with images. I am not working with words,” he explains, adding that the film is exploring just what masculinity means in the 21st Century.
In his documentaries, Mihăilescu uses fictional elements. In his fiction films, he introduces realistic elements. In evolving his directorial style, he looks back in time too, taking inspiration from the ground-breaking work of the early Soviet filmmakers.
“It [filmmaking] is different from painting. It is different from writing. We are working with A+B=C, like Kuleshov or Eisenstein,” the director declares.
