Contemplating Disaster HD video colour, single channel Duration: 11 min. Sound: Dragos Alexandrescu
Alter (Trailer) HD colour video, single channel Duration: 34 min. Language: Romanian, English, Swedish, Finnish Subtitle: English Concept film: Delia Bulgaru / Dragos Alexandrescu Script: Petronela Grigorescu / Dragos Alexandrescu / Delia Bulgaru Image director and editor: Dragos Alexandrescu
ALTER -'a change in character or composition, typically in a comparatively small but significant way'
The short film focus on the story of a group of 5 people (Romanian and Finnish actors) which, through their actions and behaviours reflect how cultural backgrounds can shape opinions or misconceptions related with a certain context. The different versions which follows, reflect the alteration of memory filtered through the personal experiences. The starting point of the film is an objective situation presented in a sort of realist manner, as an exercise of identifying the cultural and relationship stereotypes which can occur by repetition. Gradually the whole story presented is becoming a reading text emptied by any emotional or affectional relevance.
Some other time HD color video, single channel Duration: 35 min. Language: Romanian Subtitle: English Image director and editor: Dragos Alexandrescu
The Nature of Fear HD color video, single channel Duration: 7min. Sound: ON Year of finalisation: 2017
Camera and editing: Dragos Alexandrescu Sound: Sarah Nawotka(Dråsa)USA
the video can be seen at: https://vimeo.com/196651263 password: 2017
What else remain outside of the city walls? Once we step out from our comfort zone, the unknown is crawling under our imaginary beds and taking the control over our thoughts. We let our fears control us. What might concern us are not the things, but our opinions and beliefs about the things. Our thoughts construct our reality. By manipulating the light, the video present the nature in a unnatural way as a metaphor for how reality of facts can be distorted, manipulated and presented. Fear undermines rationality. Under the state of fear people are ready to accept being controlled and give up their human rights and freedoms.
The Imaginary F HD color video, single channel Duration: 18 min. Sound: ON Year of finalisation: 2017
the full length of this video can be seen at: https://vimeo.com/196413298 password: friend
The film is an interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s text Waiting for Godot. Seen from a present perspective the film is focusing on the waiting moment for a mysterious friend (God, as the imaginary friend) which has disappeared/died in a terror attack. The text combines real testimonies of some victims from the Bataclan terror attack (Paris, 2015), original parts from Beckett’t text and my own reflections about religion and human condition under the religious and political constrains.
The Social Binder HD b&w video, single channel Duration: 21 min Sound: ON Year of production: 2015
the full length of this video can be seen at: https://vimeo.com/143717295 password: lector
The film is a staged reenactment of the job as Lector/Reader (concept introduced in 1864 in Cuba), which has disappear from the contemporary society in the beginning of 20th century. The Lector’s job was ‘to entertain’ the workers during their labour hours by reading different texts. By reading aloud in front of them (during their working time), the Lector provided an education for the workers, but it also caused friction between them and the factory owners. The owners considered the texts too radical and the workers demanded more rights for them.
Payed by the workers and not by the owner of the factory, the Lectors played an important role in educating and informing the workers about their rights, open their mind about culture and politics.
My film is a sort of a performance ,video documented, with a text adapted for that specific place (sewing workshop) which include different reflections about labour (in the Eastern and Western world), the social inequality, the absurdity of what Labour became nowadays and also a feminism perspective about work. The text is the result of a collaboration with the Phd philosopher Dana Domsodi (Romania/Italy).
The Absence of Presence HD color video, single channel duration: 2 min. sound: ON year of production: 2015
Before Was Better
HD colour video, single channel Duration: 5 min. Sound: ON Year of production: 2013
This video can be seen with the password: better
The film it's based on real facts happen nowadays in Romania(but also in other former communist countries), when about thousands of families which, for a better economical situation, left their young children with the grandparents or relatives and went to work abroad. Many of them never returned home to their children or had the possibilities to bring their children with them, abroad. For most of the parents the reason was to assure to their kids a better (material) standard of life but they ignored or neglected completely the need of the parental affection. In many cases, this children had big issues in social integration -adaptation and felt abandoned despite all the material support which they got from the parents.
Living in Finland, I made also an analogy with a related situation happened in the second War World, when aprox. 70 000 Finnish children were evacuated in Sweden, Norway and Danmark. At that times, the Finns had reasons to fear a humanitarian catastrophe following the expected Soviet occupation.
Exercising Failure
HD video B&W single channel Duration: 5 min. Sound: ON Year of production: 2013
This video can be seen with the password: failure
Collective Intimacy
HD Video B&W, single channel Duration: 5 min. Sound: ON Year of Production: 2012
This video can be seen with the password: intimacy
The video is a metaphor that makes references to the power of control sustained by the Ideological Apparatus, a term developed by the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser. In this particular case, the relation between the institutional part (served to transmit the values of the state) and The State (who maintain the order in a society), take the form of an intimate dialog in which, its recorded message, is systematically examined, de-composed and re-composed. This tactic, used often by oppressive regimes, could turn even a love relationship into a political/economical statement.
Notes about Efficiency
HD video colour, single channel Duration: 12 min. Sound: ON Year of production: 2014
This video can be seen with password: efficiency
Structured in four parts, the video present impersonal notes consisted in actions designed to achieve efficiency in different area of production. The video follow chronological the steps of implementing this notion from different stages of our existence. Focusing on subjects as education, work, recreation and creation the film series have an rhetorical /ironical look of our society in which the efficiency become a form of standardisation of life and its repressing the fantasy the meditative and free way of thinking
Love. Utopia. Economy
Super8 mm film, B&W, single channel Duration: 10 min Sound: ON Year of production: 2011
The work is a video and text piece, which contrasts the Eastern and Western utopian visions of perfection - that of society and that of human beings. The video is made on super 8mm film and is a melancholic description of a text inspired by different sources related to perfection, economy and relationships. The text contains a mixture of word extracts from the Financial Times newspaper where the economy is analyzed through emotive language; the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848); and the vision of perfection from the Danish director Jørgen Leth's film The Perfect Human (1967).