MILK TEETH

Synopsis

Romania, 1989. The twilight of Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship. In a small, isolated town, Maria, a ten-year-old girl, is the last person to witness her sister disappearing in front of her eyes. Torn apart by the loss, she is trying to make sense of a new, terrifying reality. Can she summon up the courage to grow up?

Statement of the director(s)

The first image of MILK TEETH came to me in 2019: a young girl listening in total silence, with her right ear pressed against a cement wall. It was a dream, one of the many I started having after reading military records of the Romanian communist police from 1989, about the disappearance of an 11-year-old girl from a small town. I wanted to make a film about a kind of muteness, about the inability to articulate, to describe in words an inner universe that is in constant danger of bursting into flames. Over the years, I twisted and changed this idea several times, somehow trying to find the film's own “voice”. It became a coming-of-age story about the aftermath of a tragedy. A film about a young girl who tries to make sense of a confusing and cruel world that suddenly unfolds before her eyes. Caught between two dimensions – reality and fantasy, political oppression and the rise of the so-called “new world” at the beginning of 1990 – this little girl represents the “lost generation of children”, the same generation I belong to. The children who believed in freedom, only to discover that their voices will not be heard by anyone. This is how MILK TEETH became what it is now: a film that chooses not to speak directly about a child struck by muteness, but about someone who gathers words in their mind, waiting for the right moment to shout out those words to the entire world.
Production:

Review

Screen International Review