One World Festival starts this weekend

The film “The Death of Iosif Zagor,” the directorial debut documentary by Adi Dohotaru, will be premiered on Friday at 7:00 PM at Cinema Eforie, kicking off the One World Romania Festival 2024 – held between April 4-14. This year, the festival continues online.

This year, electoral elections are a global focus, including for One World Romania Festival, with Romania facing an unprecedented electoral period deciding both European Parliament representatives and local, parliamentary, and presidential leaders. It’s a pivotal moment to reflect on our choices, considering the complexity they entail due to factors like ethnicity, community, and power dynamics. Despite the inability to choose the times we live in, we can adopt attitudes of empathy, resilience, and solidarity. The One World Romania festival presents a curated selection of documentaries exploring choice from historical, systemic, and individual perspectives.

Moreover, in addition to the two programmes dedicated to her short films, artist and filmmaker Maryam Tafakory’s presence at the festival will also extend to a series of special live performances, while the five screenings highlighting some of Eyal Sivan’s most notable work will be followed by masterclass held by the filmmaker: “Brushing history against the grain – Documentary; Truth; Montage”.

The Sahia Vintage program returns with a selection of newsreels curated by Adina Brădeanu, and the new addition to the festival, the High School Days, will take place over three days, during which high school students are invited to attend screenings and activities aimed at providing them with the necessary tools to further contribute to and engage with their communities.

The festival is also showcasing a series of projects and events focused on education, community and the documentary film industry.

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Opening of One World Romania Festival

The film tells the story of videographer Iosif Zagor documenting the last four years of his life, his loneliness, and illness, discussing his fears of being forcibly evicted from three different locations where he lived in poor conditions in old age. Mr. Zagor used his old camera to record his life and that of others in social housing but did not film his evacuations because he was simply busy packing, as described in the film’s presentation.

The film is both poetic justice and self-representation through a video voice technique of those invisible people who do not fit into the dynamic image of large and expensive cities like Cluj-Napoca.

“I directed ‘The Death of Iosif Zagor’ because I failed. As an activist, as a researcher, or as a politician, I, together with other experts, activists, and vulnerable people I encountered, proposed public policies through which authorities invest in social housing. The EU average of social and affordable housing is just under 10%, but in Romania, it’s even lower: 1%,” said Adi Dohotaru, the film’s director.

The main theme of the documentary, housing, is viewed through the lens of vulnerability, presenting the problematic context in which access to housing for vulnerable or marginalized individuals becomes increasingly difficult. Additionally, the film addresses the eviction processes of these individuals and the abusive ways in which they take place. The film aims to give voice to the main protagonist, Iosif Zagor, and to create a context of self-representation, advocating for the space to be given to vulnerable individuals to tell their own story and become visible, as stated in the press release.

“In the raw footage filmed by Iosif Zagor, I saw an existential, profoundly disturbing story. If Adi Dohotaru talks about the housing problem, I see in this film a story about the human condition and the awareness of our fragility,” says the film’s producer, Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan.

The documentary is directed by Adi Dohotaru, produced by Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan through the production company Filmways, in co-production with SOS – Organized Sustainable Society, co-producers Adi Dohotaru and Radu Gaciu, and edited by Alexandru Popescu. The film is made with the support of the Documentary Film Master Program of the Faculty of Theatre and Film within the “Babeş-Bolyai” University of Cluj-Napoca.