Documentary filmmaking allows authors to connect with audiences through their memories. Docu-essays and diaries transport memories to the screen in a proposition of developing and expanding the feelings of the past. As we watch the first minutes of Tata, the film by Radu Ciornciuc and Lina Vdovîi, we travel back to 1999.
A home video of three young girls presents us with that family dynamics. Soon, Lina surges into voice-over and tells us that her father went from Moldava to Italy to work, and the VHS tapes were a capsule to update about their daily lives. In a short period, she introduces about twenty-plus years of her life. She left home to become a journalist, a war journalist, and would travel around the world to capture the cruelty of the conflicts. As the brief introduction ends, we see her and Radu, co-director, and her husband – driving through roads and conversing. They are going to Italy to visit her father.
It may sound like a conventional family reunion documentary, but Tata is about violence – labor exploitation, psychological abuse, and physical beating. The directing collages the film into three different narrative lines. The underpayment and overworking of her father, who suffers insults and beatings from his boss. The psychological abuse of the labor relationship, but also the one Vdovîi was exposed to by the toxic behavior of her father while growing up.
Lastly, all the physical violence that she and her sisters went through when their father was at home. In a dichotomy of the different brutality that Vdovîi has suffered and her father has faced in their lives, Vdovîi searches to understand and help her dad escape the violence he goes through daily. She uses her warzone know-how to record proof of the indecent behavior of his boss. She gives her Tata micro cameras with microphones that would help seek justice.
Tata thrives in the balance of two different realities. The first one is the past. The violence is so deep that it affected Vdovîi’s past relationships. She cites how her ex-husband would use the argument that she was too similar to her father when he left her. The confrontation of the assault cycles is what drives her to try to break them. Another reality is her active participation in helping her father to escape the rage. It is a contrasting scenario that provides nuances and an emotional connection to the film. Vdovîi is constantly reflecting on how the beatings and words she has heard from her father have affected her. When she is pregnant, she thinks it is an opportunity to interrupt the hate and disturbance inside her. Break the generational violence that harms her lineage.
In a sense, the film is a personal exercise of forgiveness – a constant reminder of helping the one that caused you the most pain. Her father was responsible for her long-suffering: he was absent, indifferent to their success growing up, and violent when home. The result of his actions was deep wounds inside her and her mother. But she never uses her trauma as a reason not to help him. When they are together to gather proof to accuse the violent boss, it is when they have the most sincere conversations. The camera assumes the role of mirroring the pain in those conversations. It is a raw work that stays too close to its subjects, documenting the constant cruelty. The hidden camera records from the victim’s perspective, while the wide shots in their conversations directly confront the one who caused pain.
Vdovîi and Ciornciuc guide us through pain, violence, and forgiveness. She decides to break the past cycles to provide an environment of love for their daughter. Vdovîi even confesses that when her child was born. She finally met true love. It works almost in the sense that she needed to forgive to love. It is not a rational process that obeys the conventional laws, but it is obedient to the soul’s rules. Tata is a sincere registration of soul healing. The wounds close up and build bridges to the numerous possibilities of the future. When her father returns to Moldova to live with her mother, the conflicts are back. But now, they will face it through a more mature lens. All the family has grown up, and they will not accept more of his toxic behavior.
Tata is a highly emotional work of forgiveness. A letter to the future while solving past problems. A beautiful testament by Lina Vdovîi to her daughter while she tries to forgive her father’s wrongdoings.
Tata recently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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