You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
(Romania 2015, 131 min)
Director: Tudor Giurgiu (also director of Love Sick and Of Snails and Men )
Writers: Tudor Giurgiu and Loredana Novak
Cast: Emilian Oprea (Cristian), Mihai Constantin (Procuror Codrea), Andreea Vasile (Dora)
Many years ago, in the Introduction to a co-edited book, my colleagues and I wrote: «We need to differentiate between a paranoia that is the result of ill-conceived thinking […] and a paranoia which is the result of processes going on outside of one's mind and control […] Although the term “persecution complex” is almost synonymous with paranoia, there is a definite sense in which one can be persecuted without being paranoid» (Berke, Pierides, Sabbadini, Schneider 1998, p.3). The title of our book is Even Paranoids Have Enemies.
The excellent movie to be discussed today, De ce eu? [Why me?], was co-scripted and directed by Tudor Giurgiu - a Romanian filmmaker best known as the producer of some thirty documentaries. Indeed this feature, while not a documentary as such, has nevertheless a similar feel to it: in how it is constructed and edited, in its camera-work, and in the compellingly realistic way in which it tells its story. Why me? recounts events inspired, as we are informed in the frames preceding the end credits, by something that actually did occur in Romania in 2002, and some of its scenes are even shot on the same locations where those facts had taken place.