Documenting Lives: The Year in Romania

Recovering exemplary lives of the recent past and recording the lives of leading intellectuals and established cultural figures of the present have been two of the main directions of life writing in Romanian culture so far, and they have continued this past year as well. Among the year's exciting new releases are autobiographies about childhood and youth under communism by well-known writers; biographies of Cold War spies, interwar cultural figures, and iconic twentieth-century singers; diasporic letters of leading intellectuals; memorialistic forays into the first half of the previous century; and intellectuals' diaries or collected personal essays about a disillusioning present.

A highly successful addition is the new book series "Biografii romanţate" [novelized biographies] published by Polirom. With eight published titles and many more in progress, the volumes in the new series significantly broaden the scope of biographical books in Romania. They center on a wide range of cultural and artistic figures who are given new life not by specialists but by well-known young novelists who took up the publisher's challenge to write the lives of canonical playwrights (Ion Luca Caragiale and Eugène Ionesco), writers (Nicolae Steinhardt), musicians (George Enescu), singers (Maria Tănase), painters (Ștefan Luchian), and sculptors (Constantin Brâncuşi). The fruitful matching of canonical names with successful writers (Moni Stănila, Dan Coman, Andrei Crăciun, Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu, among others) makes the series appeal to both the general public and more literary-minded readers, as do the captivating narrative arcs these authors develop in recounting the lives of their famous protagonists. The thorough bibliographical apparatus included in each text testifies to solid scholarship. The series has enjoyed significant market success: pre-COVID-19, its titles sold three times more copies than regular literary books, and new print runs were also made available.

The "Biografii romanţate" series illustrates the enduring relevance of the book form in Romanian life writing, but at the same time, the auto/biographical projects released this past year chart out exciting new paths. Life narratives abound in different media, including wide-ranging auto/biographical documentary films. There is also an increased and varied use of personal stories in contemporary culture. These life narratives are less about recovering the past and the lives of exemplary figures, and instead reflect the variety of contemporary lives.

What do documentaries bring to the Romanian life narrative scene? The international documentary film has gradually become entwined with "the autobiographical," namely the "the activity of self-inscription" (Renov 107), and an increasing number of auto/biographical documentaries worldwide have enriched approaches in lifewriting studies. In Romania the documentary was an important genre of socialist film and of state-sponsored propaganda before 1989, but as critics have noted, it acquired a new life in the early 2000s with a generation of filmmakers trained abroad and exposed to international documentary cultures. Romanian documentaries thus join the genres of the international festival documentary without cohering into an identifiable tradition, as new wave cinema did (Brădeanu; Cagle). This year, auto/biographical documentaries represent the majority of the released titles. They range from feature-length productions to numerous shorts—such as 3 mm by Radu Muntean, a thirty-minute film dedicated to Simona Halep, Romania's top women's tennis player; Radu Jude's Nu ştiu, an eight-minute ironic self-portrait of a prolific and critically successful young film director; and Andreea Borţun's Reflexii în Est, which chronicles migrant women's difficult lives through interviews and personal stories.

The former category includes several relational intergenerational family stories. One example is the humorous and endearing Casa cu păpuşi, in which the young film director Tudor Platon joins his grandmother and her friends over a summer holiday, trying to make up for the many years they did not spend together. Platon captures on camera their life stories and their (often amusing) conversations about their youths and worldviews. Another similarly oriented film is the powerful Holy Father, which features the director Andrei Dăscălescu's search for his father, who left his family and became an Orthodox monk in...