The film aims to create awareness about depression, something that is not easily recognized.
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Through his story, ‘Otto the Barbarian’ highlights mental health issues that society does not know how to deal with. The film aims to create awareness about depression, something that is not easily recognized.
“Above all, I wanted to emphasize the most on the need for empathy – towards the grief and hopelessness of people who face the suicide of someone close to them,” briefed director Ruxandra Ghițescu while explaining the motivation for her IFFI 51 film, a moving tale on the traumas of adolescence.
Protagonist Otto is a teenager from Bucharest who had to face his girlfriend’s suicide. The film aims to begin a conversation on the agony undergone by people like Otto, who lose their loved ones to suicide.
“This film is not constructed as a discourse. It is meant to open up a dialogue with the spectators and to raise some questions. It doesn’t provide certain answers to those questions,” said the director who has taken an attempt to bring to the fore the dismal face of grief.
“I believe that these kind of dramatics like grief, loss, suicide and murder are in most films very stylized and romanticized. Against this backdrop, the film aims to construct an anti-cinematic experience. We wanted to construct an anti-hero in a negative film where grief really showcases its ugliness. The film urges us to also look inwards, at the facades we erect to hide our true selves. The film questions the various masks we use to hide behind in our day-to-day life – the way we grow up to live in patterns we recognize around us,” deliberates Ghițescu, a Romanian visual artist and filmmaker.
The film is a story about adolescence, in the fragile age when morality is not a common concept that grown-ups live by. In teenage, time has a different feeling, the present moment expands and compresses and everything has to happen at that moment.
