Jan. 20--A 15-year-old Romanian girl becomes a de facto parent to her six brothers and sisters when Mom temporarily relocates to Italy for several months for work in the foreign language documentary "Waiting for August," which comes to Facets starting Friday.
Dad isn't around, which means the teenage Georgiana is left to cook and clean for her siblings until their mother's anticipated return in August, and Belgium-based director Teodora Ana Mihai takes a fly-on-the-wall approach to documenting their story. Mom's absence isn't presented as something traumatic but rather matter-of-fact. Through it all, Georgiana juggles homework and high school drama while fending off curious neighbors worried for these children who have been left to fend for themselves. "I loved the vivacity the kids were displaying and the joyful dynamic between the many siblings," Mihai said in an interview with the web site Selig Film News. "And thanks to their differing ages, I was able to shine a light on the reactions of the different age groups to parental absence."
A review in the Hollywood Reporter found the film to be "less the portrait of a family -- at 88 minutes the film is too short to give each of the seven siblings more than a cursory glance -- than the story of how Georgiana manages to accomplish the difficult task before her, which she does with a lot of naivete but enough will power and personality to compensate for her supposed lack of experience. Something similar can be said of Mihai, whose parents fled abroad during the Ceausescu regime, leaving her behind in Romania, and who manages to make a nonfiction film that's filled with beginners' mistakes but nonetheless gets the job done."
The doc screens at Facets Friday through Jan. 27. Go to facets.org.
