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Beloved Bucharest

Beloved Bucharest
/10
    • Beloved Bucharest
    • Bucureştiul iubit
  • 1977
  • 8mm film transferred to 16mm, color and b&w, silent
  • 14min, 37sec
Ion Grigorescu's long and careful wanderings through the streets of Bucharest offer a strikingly nuanced take on what lived behind it. The abstract forms, the tainted stones, and the ruins become carriers of human presence, be it in the immediate stories of the people around the stones and walls or as characters in the wider story told by the moving of earth and bricks. But Grigorescu does not idealize, nor does he victimize, nor does he block the understanding of the whole depth of whatever tragedy or miracle is captured by his camera. He might represent sins, but he would never judge individuals. In films like "My Beloved Bucharest", in which the outskirts of Bucharest are seen from a tram passing alongside endless housing blocks towards the center of the city while lyrics from the popular song "Beloved Bucharest" are interspersed with the images, or "New Axes" (1994) the earlier film's post-'89 response, Grigorescu seems compelled to indicate the participants, the stage, the scripts, and the authors of the script, as well as the many corrections and versions overlapping in the script. But he refuses to stage the play. C.C.