Inspired by the Fântâna Albă massacre of 1941, Tudor Giurgiu’s new film, The Spruce Forest, explores a little-known but deeply relevant historical wound. Built around the testimony of a survivor and the voice of his wife, who was deported to Siberia, the film weaves together archive footage, fiction, and emotional memory into a visual discourse that questions the very notion of historical truth and the risks of forgetting. On the occasion of the film’s world premiere at TIFF, the director talks about creative challenges, inner reflections, and the kind of freedom that cinema can (re)negotiate.
The film blends testimonies, archival footage, and fragments of fiction. What prompted this polyphonic narrative structure?
At one point, I was joking with Chirilov that people would say, “Look at him, stepping into Jude’s territory.” The first drafts of the script were going in a completely different direction: an epic reconstruction, a large-scale historical film. But especially after finishing Freedom and realizing how hard it is to make a period piece in Romania today, with the budgets we’re working with – and after accumulating so much frustration about how little you can get right in terms of detail, makeup, locations – I said to myself, “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t have the energy to make the film the way I originally imagined it.”
So I returned to the question: “Why am I making this film?” And I realized it’s about the representation of history, a theme many have explored, and ultimately about how we relate to events from the past – how much we know, how much we forget, and how blurred the boundary becomes between truth, lies, and personal responsibility.
My curiosity about the Fântâna Albă massacre, which I first learned about 10-15 years ago, brought up many questions, and the desire to try something creatively new: I had never made this kind of hybrid film before. It was also a sort of playful urge to do something different.
What do you think makes this story feel so timely today?
People often tell me, “You always release your films at the right moment.” But again, it’s a matter of coincidence. I recorded two interviews with the last surviving witnesses nine years ago. I began this journey alongside Gabriel Gheorghe, an actor turned screenwriter, who had worked with Cătălin Saizescu and other directors. Together, we asked ourselves how we could approach this subject.
We filmed the survivors, and years later, when the time came to tell the story, we returned to those interviews. One of them inspired the scenes in which Mircea Andreescu appears. That interview is incredibly raw, so authentic – the camera is hesitant, the interviewer is visible in the frame, and the voice of a neighbor interrupts the conversation. I would have used it as it was, if it weren’t for lighting issues… And of course, it was lacking in terms of dramatic arc and narrative structure. But that’s where the inspiration came from – to bring together the survivor’s and his wife’s voices.
Jude once said – half-joking, half-serious – that TikTok is “the best for cinema.” And sometimes you do get these lucky accidents, when a documentary interview suddenly offers so much on a performative level.
So it became a matter of putting together a puzzle and playing with different layers of memory: books I had read, interviews I had seen. I was also deeply interested in the story of how a theatrical performance is born – I saw Kordonsky’s Zinc Boys at Bulandra, and it was a very powerful experience. I hadn’t read Svetlana Alexievich’s book at the time, but I bought it afterward. So, various sources of inspiration helped me rewrite and reshape the script, and that’s how I arrived at this structure.
The testimony of a survivor is doubled by the voice of his wife, who was deported to Siberia. How did you work with the idea of divided, almost fractured memory?
What interested me most wasn’t so much what remains after time passes, but how we relate to our own existence and to the mistakes we’ve made in the past. I was reminded of Jacques Audiard’s A Self-Made Hero, and how you can reconfigure your entire biography, how you conceal foolish actions and past compromises.
This preoccupied me particularly because I came across an idea, in the very few books written about Fântâna Albă, that some Romanians collaborated with the Soviets and pushed their fellow countrymen, like cattle, toward death. That made me think: these people must have lived double lives. Yes, they were survivors, but when you reach old age, you often become the subject of tributes, TV interviews, and public admiration.
But how do you live with your secret? Do you ever let it surface? Are you at peace with it? Are you comfortable? These questions have stayed with me since Freedom, when I encountered real-life individuals who live in a kind of perfidious complicity with the mistakes they made during the revolution – mistakes that led to hundreds of deaths. And – paradoxically – it seems that old age grants you a kind of absolution.
Mircea Andreescu has a brilliant line in the film: “Let God judge me.” It’s as if only a divine court can still deliver justice.
Speaking of Coca Bloos and Mircea Andreescu – did you choose them because of their personal histories? Do their biographies intersect with this kind of tragedy? Or did you cast them purely for their craft?
I was thinking primarily about what they’re capable of, what they can carry emotionally. I knew that Ms. Bloos had spent some meaningful years at the theater in Piatra Neamț, but I didn’t approach the casting from a biographical angle. Of course, once we started working together, we talked a lot about families, hardship, relatives… But I think that at their age, with their wealth of experience and reading, they naturally connected to the subject.
They were terrified by the sheer amount of text, but we worked very well. Coca Bloos told me she thought I was a calm, balanced guy – but then she realized I’m actually a bit of a tormentor.
Coca Bloos also acted in The Afternoon of a Torturer.
Yes, and what I haven’t told you is that throughout this entire project, I often had in mind the idea of doing a sort of remake of The Afternoon of a Torturer. Not necessarily because of Coca, but because I think it’s a film that deserves more attention. That, too, is about a torturer confronted with the need to own up to atrocious crimes.
What I found especially rewarding in working with Coca was the way she structured her process of building a performance, as if a stage production were coming into being. She claims she doesn’t act anymore – she has this charming modesty, saying she doesn’t want to take on new roles – but she still lights up when young directors call her.
I’ve never met another actor with her ability to read a text and immediately grasp the perfect tone. What she does is truly remarkable.
In an age of historical distortion, were you concerned about how the film would be received? Did you fear ideological appropriation?
Once a film is out in the world, you can’t control the conversation anymore. You put it out there, and it follows its own path.
I don’t expect, for instance, that some nationalist or sovereigntist group will try to claim it and use it as a spearhead against those who “didn’t do enough” back then. Still, I think the film generates discussion no matter where you start from.
Some people told me the film doesn’t show how the Romanian minority in Ukraine is currently persecuted by local politicians. And that’s true—I saw it firsthand while filming. But I didn’t want the film to follow a specific political agenda. Of course, any controversy helps in the end.
Do you believe a film can take a strong stance in the fight to preserve freedom?
I realized – almost unintentionally, while talking about Freedom – that it’s such a vast theme, and that I still want to make another film about it, one that also has roots in the labor camps of 1960s Romania, the story of an escape. I feel our cinema still owes something to this subject – it hasn’t been exhausted yet.
The reactions I received, especially from young people who felt the film hit them like a punch to the gut – as if it revealed a reality that had been hidden from them – made me understand that the topic of the revolution is still enormous. They still need to piece things together for themselves, to form an image they were never given – by their parents, and certainly not by school.
And that, in a way, confirmed for me that this kind of subject still deserves to be explored. I don’t think there’s any need for didactic or nationalist positioning, or to develop some kind of stylized “approach” at any cost. But I do believe these are stories that need to be told.
Last year at Venice, I saw a film that’s also in this year’s TIFF selection – Marco, the Invented Truth – about Spain’s recent history. It’s very similar to The Spruce Forest. It deals with the same question: how do we live with lies, with compromise? How do people come to believe their falsehoods will never be exposed?
I can’t not ask you about TIFF – and let’s stay on the topic of history. How do you feel the festival has evolved, and what do you wish for its future?
We’ve reached that stage of growth I never imagined when I started: the moment when kids who came to TIFF with their parents in its early years were just watching films…
You mean me as well 🙂
Yes, exactly… and not only that. Some of them went through TIFF workshops, maybe even volunteered, and now they’re studying film, they have films in the program, and they write that TIFF changed their lives.
You see, we’ve reached a point where a generation was shaped – one way or another – through TIFF, and decided that film, media, or journalism is what they want to pursue. To me, that’s the best proof that TIFF is on the right track.
Otherwise, sure, you can brag about record attendance, or who comes and who doesn’t – but it’s not about that. It’s about what you leave behind in the community. And when it comes to the future… we don’t know what tomorrow will bring. “Tomorrow is fear,” as Chirilov says.
Yes. Thank you so much!
The Spruce Forest will be screened in a special one-time showing on Friday, June 20, at 7:00 PM, at the Student House (Casa de Cultură a Studenților).