‘Periferic ‘is a dark story about a woman named Matilda (played by actress Ana Ularu) who has only 24 hours release from after two years in prison, after which she must return back to serve another three years.
In that 24hours she plans to escape with money promised to her by her ex-boyfriend and to find her son, Toma. She visits her brother and her ex-boyfriend and then goes in search of her son, but just when everything appears like it's going to work out all goes terribly wrong, leaving the viewer with a chilling reality check on the universal epidemic of individual and social morality and the contemporary broken family, showing an apparent wasteland left by the present generation to its future ones. Is it a comment on the world we live in today or mere warning?
The original screenplay was written by a Romanian Palm d'Or winning writers Cristian Mungiu and Ioana Uricaru and they offered Bogdan to direct it. "But the story was more about the outskirts of Bucharest so that's why it's called Periferic," Bogdan stated, "before being a filmmaker I was a lawyer and I knew a man that was in his position that had only one day away from prison. He was my client so I knew the story was very real. I just made the male character female."
Most of the time in films we see the child represented as a kind of symbol of hope to change the ruin the previous generation has laid to waste. But in this unique story, the child is the one who actively chooses to take the dark path towards a bleak and hopeless future on the -periferic- outbound street life. I asked Bogdan if this was a comment on Romanian culture today or just a comment on humanity itself in today's world?
"I really didn't make a movie about Romanian society. I've always thought in terms of the main character and for me the key is the never ending story itself or how history repeats itself being stuck in some kind of issues. I get this question a lot but honestly I never meant this to be some metaphor about Romanian society. It's just a particular story about some particular characters, in Periferic, living on the edge of a society. The movie is quite pessimistic as a story but I am quite positive about Romanian society."
written by Vanessa McMahon Dec 12, 2010
STAY TUNED FOR AN INTERVIEW WITH BOGDAN COMING UP!
Bogdan at TIFF 2010