US AGAINST US

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(Documentary, RO, 2020, 74 min.)
director: Andra Tarara
protagonists: Ion Tarara, Andra Tarara
image: Andra Tarara, Ion Tarara
editing: Andra Tarara
sound: Flora Pop
producers: Anamaria Antoci, Anda Ionescu
a Tangaj Production production

Shown at the following festivals: Ji.hlava IDFF 2020, Les Films de Cannes à Bucarest 2020, Moldova Film Festival 2021, Moscow International Documentary Film Festival Doker 2021, Ceau! Cinema 2021, Transilvania International Film Festival 2021, ASTRA Film Festival 2021 – winner of the Best Film Award.

Two screens. Father and daughter film one another. He has schizophrenia; she has grown up without him. A series of interviews begins, in which the two discuss schizophrenia, their own pasts, and their conceptions of happiness. As they film, the two reveal the wounds caused in the past and try to understand one another.

Andra Tarara is a documentary film maker, video artist, photographer, and archivist. She was born in Giurgiu in 1994, and at present lives in Bucharest. She studied Film and Television Image at the I.L. Caragiale National University of Theatre and Film (UNATC) from 2013 to 2016, and in 2018 she completed a masters degree in visual anthropology at SNSPA Bucharest. Her first film as director, O moarte în familia mea (A death in my family), premiered at the TIFF2018 Romanian Film Days, earned her a Gopo Award nomination in 2019, in the “Young Hope” category. She currently works as an archivist in the Image Archive of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant and on independent photography and video projects. In 2020, her first documentary feature film, Noi împotriva noastră (Us against us), made in collaboration with her father, had its international premiere at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.