Woman: Wake up! There’s a thief in the kitchen.
Man: Nonsense. It’s the cat.
Woman: What cat? We’ve never had a cat.
Man: We’ve never had a thief either.
The above is a rough translation of an exchange between two characters in an old Romanian film. This passage found its way into the work of DribBler, a Romanian DJ whom Laura exposed me to. I started collecting other Romanian musicians too. I’ll have a stockpile by the time I get home (for anyone who’s interested).
After getting milk, juice and Red Bull (for Laura) from the grocery story across the street, I headed off to Piața Romana where I found a cafe called, ‘Casablanca’. The cafe was located in another really great building with arches, high ceilings and a turret. Great ambience. In Romanian, I ordered Coffee and placinta (a Romanian pastry, not the thing that’s expelled from a uterus after birth).
Laura called at around 11am and we agreed to meet in the Metro station at Piața Victoriei, a square located one stop to the north of Piața Romana. From there we took the Metro one more stop down the line and walked to TVR, Romania’s public broadcaster.
The last couple of days have been quite the emersion into the Romanian film & television thing. On Tuesday, Laura and I had a meeting with ProTV (Romania’s 2nd largest broadcaster) about InJustice. They’d never seen anything like it and seemed interested. Now we were meeting with TVR and they also seemed quite keen. Neither broadcaster was interested in versioning the show into Romanian. It seems they actually prefer their television to be played in English, with Romanian subtitles. Laura was a real pro in the meeting. She was there to be my Romanian translator in case I encountered a communication problem, but in the meeting, she jumped in on the pitch, in english, and picked up on things I forgot to mention. You’d think she’d been pitching the show for months. She said it was weird for her to be a Romanian, speaking English in a business meeting, to three other Romanians.
We also to met with the National School of Film and Theatre. I just wanted to aquaint myself with the place. You never know if their students could be a resource for us down the road, should we ever shoot in Romania. The school seems to have a world class curriculum, but suffers under the weight of funding pressures. The Dean of Theatre wanted to use ‘InJustice’ as a teaching tool for his playwriting class… very cool. I’ll send him a copy once I get back.