If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle

Director's Statement

IF I WANT TO WHISTLE, I WHISTLE is a movie that raises a strong question about responsibility, our responsibility towards the ones around us and mostly towards our children. I don't see this film as a prison movie that presents strange and exotic places that we usually don't have access to. This particular documentary approach is one that I am not at all interested in. My goal is to portray two characters in two very different positions and still with very similar attitudes, two characters that communicate at a very intimate level. I wanted to deconstruct their reality on page in order to reconstruct it in front of the camera. The main character is Silviu, a charismatic adolescent at the beginning of his life. He is "the juvenile delinquent", one of those kids we don't want to know of, one of those we want to stay away from, one of the outcasts. I want the viewer to meet and see a wild, tough, street-wise kid at the beginning of the film. As the story progresses, the spectator will get to know him, will draw closer to him, and will eventually understand him and his position. The viewer will understand that beyond the mask he put on, Silviu is a sensitive and fundamentally insecure adolescent. By the end of the film, as Silviu pulls off his mask and expects rewards, the viewer has already bonded with this kid and sees the long denied love he is looking for as important as Silviu sees it. But this love is exactly the thing that is aggressively denied to Silviu. Now the viewer will understand Silviu's reaction at a very intimate level, and even if he may not agree with it as a rational outcome, everybody will be emotionally involved with my character. Everybody's heart will shrink as he takes the hostages, will hope he would succeed against all odds and break free. Our hearts hope for Silviu's redemption to the very last second and they will break together with Ana's at the end. I want to make a clear distinction between the world beyond the bars and the world inside the prison. And I want to clearly go against the common place of the gray prison with gray walls and gray kids. What is going to be gray is the outside world, Ana’s world, which will bear the gray of our safety and our confusion. Inside, I will have a vibrant atmosphere, not a color saturated one, but one that expresses energy above everything else. The prison will express this energy mostly because of Silviu, because of his persona, his own unbounded energy and his useless and irrational hopes. I want to keep the prison alive. No matter what things are happening there, I want it alive and vibrating.