Three years after his feature debut Meda or the Not So Bright Side of Things [+] won Hearts of Sarajevo for Best Director and Best Actor at the Sarajevo Film Festival, Romanian director Emanuel Pârvu has finished shooting his second feature, Mikado, at the beginning of this week. Mikado is produced by FAMart, represented by Miruna Berescu, and co-produced by Natura Party (Teodor Mirea) and Bogdan George Apetri as a private party.
The screenplay, written by Alexandru Popa with Pârvu himself, centres on the relationship between Cristi (Şerban Pavlu), a widowed father, and his teenage daughter Magda (Ana Indricău). The family’s happiness is put to the test when, on the spur of the moment, Magda gives a valuable necklace received from Cristi to a girl, a patient in the oncology ward at the hospital where Magda volunteers together with her boyfriend Iulian (Tudor Cucu). Cristi’s reaction to what he considers a reckless decision will push the family towards inevitable change.
The production started in the last week of July and ended on 23 August. The film was entirely shot in Bucharest, with Silviu Stavilă serving as DoP. The budget amounts to approximately €780,000, with about half of this amount coming from the Romanian National Film Center.
Producer Miruna Berescu told Cineuropa that “even though the film’s budget already had every cent accounted for,” approximately 4% of it was spent on observing the regulations devised by the Romanian authorities for film production during the pandemic. Berescu explained that her shooting strategy included renting bigger temporary offices so that her team could work in smaller, separated groups.
Director Emanuel Pârvu explained that parts of the story had to be changed for the current context. “The pandemic would have made some sequences not hard to shoot, but hard to believe. So we had to adapt. Setting the story in this specific time I think may become an opportunity, in a few years, to reconsider the situation we now live in.” Talking about the origin of his story, he said that “the relationship between parents and children is the strongest. Every man lives with his various anxieties and searches for some solutions for his obsessions. Perhaps my own relationship with my daughter is not yet complete and I am searching for a stronghold to make it complete”.
by Stefan Dobroiu