This year’s Romanian Days selection at the Transilvania Film Festival sees national filmmakers split largely into two thematic categories: piercing documentaries looking at the Romania of today and films grappling with the country of yesteryear. Igor Cobileanski’s “Comatogen,” however, goes against this grain in playing with genre to tell the story of a mother going to extreme lengths to keep her young, troublesome son from going to prison — or much worse.
Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s world premiere in Cluj, Cobileanski — whose career spans over two decades and includes directing high-profile projects such as HBO’s “Shadows” and “Hackerville” — says he is particularly nervous about sharing his latest with audiences.
“As a filmmaker, you never know how audiences are going to react, but with ‘Comatogen’ I don’t know at all, and I feel like this is a test for me. I was so immersed in making it for many years that there were times when I wasn’t convinced people would understand it, but I am looking forward to finally knowing.”
“Comatogen” is structured in a classic “Rashomon” format of multiple subjective points of view of the same events, taking place over two days in Bucharest. It starts with Alina (Daniela Nane), a nurse working with comatose patients, who rekindles a teenage romance with a pompous real estate agent, a man who generously offers to hire her 20-something-year-old son for an entry-level position at his agency. When her son steals a large sum of cash from her new beau, Alina is sent headfirst on a downward spiral of desperation that will see her sealing a dangerous deal with Mihaela (Ada Lupu), the rich daughter of one of her patients.
It took Cobileanski almost a decade to get the film made. He first started working on the script in 2016, but “wasn’t convinced it worked” back then, so he moved on to other projects such as “The Eastern Affair” and “The Practice” while tinkering with the film’s structure in the background. “When you are developing a project, sometimes you spend so much time in a state of permanent change. Even when we started shooting the film, I still had questions.”
“I was very interested in religious hypocrisy and at first I was only following Alina, who trusted God so much but, because of money, was able to do something she never thought she was capable of,” he adds of those early inspirations. “So it started from an ethical problem, and after that, I began writing more characters and expanding this world to investigate this idea of hypocrisy from different points of view. Around the second draft, I started thinking about how this hypocrisy affects every character in the film and how to look at the way that happens.”
“Comatogen” courtesy of TIFF
Playing with elements of classic suspense and infusing his film with a hefty dose of violence and dread, Cobileanski says such stylistic decisions best fit the moral questionings of the film. When asked about the current state of Romanian cinema and its perceived lack of genre offerings, the Romania-based Moldovan director categorically says he doesn’t think the country’s cinema is “focused on the historical and the past.”
“I know a lot of directors and movies that speak to present times through genre,” he emphasizes. “It’s hard for me to understand my film within this context of new Romanian cinema, because I think that’s not my job. I feel happy and comfortable just being part of it, and all I want is to be a good filmmaker and to tell good stories.”
True to the variety of the country’s cinema, Cobileanski is presenting a second film in Cluj, the medium-length dramedy “The Madman,” screening amongst the short films in Romanian Days. The film is set in a monastery in 1992, right after the Romanian Revolution, as men are asked to evacuate the old building. All do so, apart from the titular madman, who has a mysterious reason to stay behind.
“We worked on it as a pilot for an anthology series with standalone episodes,” says Cobileanski, adding that, unfortunately, they couldn’t find co-producers to take on the series, but he had fallen in love with the idea and wanted to share it independently. “It’s hard to place medium-length films these days, so I’m glad to be screening it at the festival. Having these two films play at Transilvania is a great way of showing people how different Romanian cinema can be.”