To think of Mind Days, one should compare it to other film festivals in Cluj.
I remember the 2021 edition of TIFF film festival. There was an autobiographical film where the filmmaker interviewed her father and his struggle with mental illness called “We against ourselves.” Some statement by one of the individuals in the film was critical of how some psychotherapy doesn’t take new research into account.
The questions were horrendous. Rather than sympathy and a desire to improve, there was an audience member, perhaps a psychology student, who attacked the film for being unfair to psychiatrists. Unfortunately, our intrepid reporter who recorded this incident didn’t come up with a better question, no one did.
Even questioning that you might be doing something wrong is considered unfair? Well, if I needed a psychiatrist, I don’t think I’d look in Cluj.
However, the “Festivalul Internațional de Psihanaliză și Film” or International festival of psychoanalysis and Film, was much better. A couple of years ago they had a French film called “Un divan à Tunis”, literally “a Couch in Tunis.” (As usual, the English translation was mediocre. Arab Blues? Sounds like a musical or something.) This film was fun, and so was the audience. I hardly ever heard that much laughing in a movie theatre in Romania.
A Couch In Tunis (I want to improve the title, indulge me) tells the story of a Tunisian who grew up and studied in France, returning to her family home of Tunisia to start a business. Why Tunisia? I don’t know, maybe she wasn’t a citizen and got deported, maybe there were some very toxic people in France to get away from… the movie gives some kind of explanation, but it doesn’t matter.
When she deals with paperwork in trying to get her psychology practice legal, I am sure the local audience could relate. The patients, not used to psychiatry, have all kinds of funny problems, and a few serious ones. It is a struggle of one woman against the world, and it is an adventure.
The films at Mind Days are all pretty depressing. Most deal with death, or someone who has extreme forms of illness, as the main theme covered throughout the film. We do have films in a variety of languages, so we tried one in Dutch, Zee van Tijd. It was advertised as being “See of Time.”
We won’t discuss the Romanian system of subtitling here. It was pretty accurate, there were times when I wondered if the subtitles were from an English version rather than the Dutch, but the titles kept the story moving. (Mevrouw is basically Doamnă, not milady. We say Mevrouw Peters to mean Mrs Peters. Meneer, is Domnul. Or, mister, in English. Not “sir.” It doesn’t imply you are in the middle ages or have a title, these are words you use every day at the supermarket in Holland and Belgium.)
After the film, the questions were a bit fun. Not as fun as some of the cringe comments in the TIFF festival (where we learned from the adept way some directors’ responded). Not as fun as they could be, seeing the filmmakers were not there. But it was fun to see people criticise the characters. “The inlaws are complicit.” And make sweeping generalisations about the ways that men and women deal with grief.
The questions were a bit pointed. In a way, a psychologist asked the audience questions, pointing the direction of the discussion. So, I didn’t get to bring up my point about the inexistence of “milady” in the original Dutch. But, people commented on the film as if that is some kind of normal way to react.
I expect some people enjoy this, it is kind of like a open university lecture. It reminds me of the discussions we had in language classes, of films we watched to study language and culture at university (except with much older people doing the discussing.)
The festival continues for the rest of the weekend.