The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which took place in the summer of 1975 in Helsinki, with its miraculous basket 3, meant a significant change in the policy of the European West and, in particular, the United States, regarding human rights and freedoms. emigration A fact that in Romania also led to an increase in the influx of the population to emigration offices.

Since the Communist authorities in Bucharest very often denied Romanians the right they had even ratified, or by signing various international treaties, many petitioners expressed their hope on the radio Free Europe. The legendary director of which Noel Bernard once created a new show. He was called Romania and human rights. The show had a long intro in which Romanians were advised by the voice of Ioana Magure-Bernard to think carefully about the decision to leave their country. But this did not mean that the station did not understand and support their wishes.

In several editorials, Bernard also touched on the topic of emigration, stressing that even in the West life is not easy, that there are no admissions committees, that living with new rules and a new way of life can very often be difficult. If not impossible.

Even after 1989, things did not get much easier. It became easy to leave, but it was much more difficult to be accepted in another country. Everything was and still is even more complicated when you want the United States to be the country of adoption. When you’re about to experience for yourself what the American Dream really means.

This is the main theme of the film Honeymoonespecially known as Lemonadethe debut production of director Ioana Urikaru, herself an émigré, was broadcast last week in TVR Cultural. The film arrived in Romania in autumn 2018 after a successful presentation in the section Panorama Berlin Film Festival and after showing in 20 other places in Europe.

Lemonade this is the story of Mara, a nurse who has a child named Dragos and who wants to start a new life in America. First, she arrives in the promised land herself, marries a man named Daniel, whom she took care of after an accident at work, tries to sell everything from Romania, where she returns her son. He still needs a work permit, the famous one Carte Verde. Which turns out to be extremely difficult to obtain. The new rules of conduct, sometimes absurd or skeptically implemented, studies, investigations and interviews of all kinds, are very often not very friendly, associating them with harassment and requests for sexual favors by officials whose purpose is to protect the law. , but jealousy and trouble in a new marriage.

Actually in Honeymoon celebrity the american dream deconstructed, say the French, de toutes piisceases An essential idea is expressed by one of the secondary characters of the film, a Serbian lawyer anointed with all ointments. America is not Disneyland.

is there this Lemonade which film can be called anti-American? He somehow brings to the screens what could be called terrible America, to quote the title of a famous book by Edward Baer? no In any case. Lemonade it is a realistic film, a fair and useful deconstruction of the myth. In the chronicle published in Vol. 946 from November 2018 Cultural observatory, Bohdan Giu characterizes it as “a precise, subtle, accurate film with a pharmaceutical realism of form and composition.” The movie we’re dealing with export of realism. A film in which a Romanian filmmaker boldly talks not about the misfortunes in Romania before and after 1989, but about what happens both good and bad to others. There is racism, and perverted people, and persons who practice abuse of office, and persons who consider themselves too proud of themselves, and violence as much as possible.

Lemonade undoubtedly a brave film. And not only because of the topic being considered and the point of view from which it is being considered. Being herself at the time of her debut, Iryna Urikaru dared to entrust the role of the great actress Melina Manovichi. And she, at that moment, was a debutante. Chosen not only because she earned a degree in English from the University of Iași before completing her acting studies at the Western University of Timisoara, and the film is in Romanian and English. Melina Manovichi impressively conveys the full picture of the humiliations that Marie has to endure. A sea that fully lives with the ambiguity of the emigrant’s condition. Whoever is also the winner is the loser. –

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