Acasa, My Home

(Romania, Germany / 2020 / Directed by Radu Ciorniciuk)

Sundance award-winner, Acasa, My Home, tells the story of a Romanian family that lived fully off-grid in an abandoned water reservoir just outside of bustling Bucharest. When their land becomes a public park, they are evicted and forced to move to the city, where their fishing rods are replaced by smartphones and their idle afternoons are confined to classrooms.

Shot over three years, Radu Ciorniciuc’s film blends intimacy and lyricism with a clear-eyed honesty about what it’s depicting. His camera follows the Enache family cavorting in fields and streams, catching fish bare-handed, horsing around in tall grasses, and spending cozy nights together in their tiny, trash-strewn home. Gica, Vali, and their nine children have opted into a lifestyle that gives them their freedom. But they are also desperately poor, and as their existence is interrupted by the growing demands of the modern world, the family struggles between conforming and maintaining connections to the ideals they were previously living. With their roots in the wilderness, the concrete jungle creates fissures in the family members’ lives that are amazing to behold. “A remarkable piece of documentary access” (Peter Rainer, Film Week), Acasa, My Home artfully conveys hard-to-capture tensions between mainstream social structures and the ideals of off-grid living.

Unrated. 1 hr 26 mins.
In Romanian and English with subtitles.