Midterm Report Part 3: Grant Progress

Much of my ambivalence about my grant, and the decision to take it, had to do with my proposed film subject. In order to get the grant I have, you have to have letters of support from the host country. In order to get the letters, you have to know people in the country. The people I knew, and the subjects I knew the most about given my previous experience in Romania, were related to child welfare. So I went with what I already knew, despite not being sure that the documentary I was proposing would actually work. Sometimes the theoretical idea does not match up with the reality; sometimes the film idea you have in your head is not logistically possible. So in coming here without doing preproduction first, I was taking a pretty big chance. Experienced documentary film producers might call it foolish; more adventurous philosophical types might call it a wonderful chance to experience the delicious uncertainty of the universe.

The problem is that I fall somewhere in the middle of these two perspectives. At heart I think I'm an adventurous philosophical type (though certain people might just say I'm chronically disorganized. :) But I also know too much about the challenges of filmmaking to really enjoy experiencing the delicious uncertainty of the universe without a damn good plan to record it on tape. All good film producers know that without a solid strategic plan for production and distribution somewhere along the way—and the earlier the better—films usually don’t get finished and funded and seen. But in a world as unpredictable as filmmaking, there are always those exceptions--if the Film Gods are on your side.

My proposed film, I have to admit, is not the most thematically original. I proposed to follow up on five children that I had met while working in a school for children with disabilities in Beclean, Romania--a small town in northern Transylvania. Since I'd last seen them four years ago, all but one of these children had been placed in a family. I thought it could be interesting to see how the children had changed since moving from an institutional setting to a family setting. This is all part of a nationwide movement in Romania to improve its notorious child welfare system, a movement that has been rapidly accelerating in view of Romania's projected 2007 accession to the European Union. New policies are being put in place, with the help of international NGO's, to close or renovate the large traditional institutions (orphanages) and place children in smaller, family settings. Additionally, a moratorium was placed on international adoptions in Romania due to widespread corruption, which was then followed by a total ban due to violation of the moratorium. The Romanian government felt that the only way it could eliminate corruption in a policy area so critical for EU membership was to stop international adoptions altogether.

The new child welfare laws stipulate that children in the system be placed in the least restrictive environment, and one that is as close to a family setting as possible. In order of priority, that means: 1) With the child’s own biological parent(s), 2) Extended family members; 3) adoption within Romania by non-biological parents, 4) a foster family, and 5) a group home or residential living environment. This all sounds good, and there are success stories and very visible improvements. But my firsthand experience (which is restricted to one region) of how it’s all working is that things are a lot more complicated than that. When are they not?

The challenge for me has been to find, in this complex tangle of politics, policy, and the individual lives of the children I know, a thematic and narrative throughline. Add to this the challenges of making a film in a foreign country with almost no crew, the restrictions related to filming children in foster homes, and a shoestring budget and you get lots and lots and LOTS of delicious uncertainty of the universe, sometimes so much that I want to scream. (I’ll write a post about my last shoot, and you’ll see what I mean.) On a good day, I can laugh about it. On a bad day, I think that I’m a total masochist.

There have been many, many times when I have questioned whether I should just throw this film idea out the window and start over with something new. There’s a great line in a book called “Directing the Documentary” by Michael Rabiger, in which he says that somewhere around the middle of every production, he begins to fantasize about turning into a rural grocer so that he will never have to finish his film. I have a long list of escapist fantasies. But for whatever reason, I can’t seem to let the project go. There are plenty of logical reasons to scrap it, as well as a few illogical ones (a tarot card reader in a Thai restaurant I went to in January told me I should start a new project). But aside from the fact that I’ve already put so much work into it and would have a hard time finding a whole new subject in this limited time frame, there is something that continues to drive this documentary forward, albeit slowly and painfully. It’s my genuine curiosity about the children, and how they’re turning out, and what is happening to them. The decisions they make about what they want and how little control they have over most areas of their lives. The way that others perceive them, and how this affects their perception of themselves. Their desire to be part of a family and to be helpful and needed. These really are universal issues.

But in the world of filmmaking, and the media in general, universal themes cannot be dissociated from their sociocultural context. In other words, the first question I am likely to get is, “Why did you make this particular film in Romania?” It’s a valid question. I think that the answer I would give would not necessarily satisfy a board of film critics or a funder (or many Romanians), but the real answer is this: Because I’m here for nine months, because I care about these kids, and because I’m genuinely curious. Without curiosity, you already know the answers to the questions your film raises, and so will the audience. I’m just trying to take it one day at a time.