Romanian documentary wins top prize at Krakow festival

Acasa, My Home, the debut documentary of Romanian director Radu Ciorniciuc, won the Golden Horn award for the best film at this year’s edition of the Krakow Film Festival, dedicated to documentary, animated and short feature films.

It is the fourth award the documentary receives, after the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Cinematography at this year’s Sundance film festival, the grand prize at DOK.fest Munchen, and the special jury prize at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. It is eligible for an Oscar nomination.

At the Krakow Film Festival, the documentary was awarded “for its remarkable and complex storytelling that is presented from the children’s perspective of a Roma family. This extraordinarily intimate and authentic film artfully captures the multiple layers of the social, emotional, and political realities the family wrestles with as they struggle to maintain their way of life, dignity, sense of self-determination, and cultural identity. It is highly unusual when a single documentary film, such as this one, is able to successfully examine and explore so many important aspects of the human condition within one beautifully crafted story.”

The documentary tells the story of a family who lived for 20 years in Bucharest’s Văcărești Delta, until the place received the status of a protected area and became the Văcărești Nature Park. For four years, the director followed the family as it moved from living in harmony with nature to having to adapt to the challenges of the city.

Acasa, My Home is a Romania-Germany-Finland co-production. Lina Vdovîi and Ciorniciuc wrote the script, based on the 2017 book of the same name.

In May, the documentary was part of a fundraising campaign aimed at helping needy families in Romania affected by the financial crisis caused by the coronavirus. The Alex Fund campaign is coordinated by Leslie Hawke, the mother of actor Ethan Hawke.

(Photo: Mircea Topoleanu)