Jan. 22--The strongest new film I've seen this month hasn't made hundreds of millions of dollars, nor is it up for a foreign language Academy Award. It does not, in fact, have a U.S. distributor. But you should see it this week at Facets Cinematheque while it's around.
"Waiting for August" is a perceptive, heartbreaking debut documentary from Teodora Ana Mihai, a Romanian-born director whose parents fled the country during the Ceausescu era, and who now lives in Antwerp, Belgium. Her subject here is huge, in that the seven siblings -- all younger than 18, living on their own in midsize Bacau, Romania, while their mother works in Turin, Italy -- have become cogs in a geo-economic wheel. At the same time Mihai's film is tightly focused and, at times, almost painfully intimate.
The seven Halmac kids share a small high-rise apartment where the TVs are rarely off and the potatoes are always on the stove. Georgiana, who turns 15 early in the picture, has assumed the role of mother bear, caretaker, guardian. She is also a teenager coping with homework, high school entrance exam prep, boys, a turbulent emotional life.
The kids' mother Skypes occasionally from Italy, sends Easter gifts, placates Georgiana on the phone with phrases such as: "That's life." Or: "We have to make sacrifices sometimes." As the months pass and the children long for the return (temporary, it appears) of their mother, "Waiting for August" shows us children at various sorts of risk, though there's considerable love at play as well.
There's also a confidence and an implacable reserve in the way Mihai becomes a fly on the wall. Threatened with intervention from child protection services, Georgiana visits an ailing, aging upstairs neighbor who offers help when she's able. "If people can't feed their children," the woman asks, "shouldn't they leave to find work?" Yet we see, firsthand, where that leaves the offspring left behind. No pat solutions exist in "Waiting for August." There are, however, moments of telling detail and quiet, lingering insight that point to a major filmmaker in the making.
"Waiting for August" -- 3 1/2 stars
No MPAA rating
Running time: 1:28; in Romanian with English subtitles
Plays: Friday-Thursday at Facets Cinematheque
mjphillips@tribpub.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
