Garlanded with prizes at every film festival at which it has screened, Belgium-based, Romanian-born Teodora Ana Mihai’s feature debut, the documentary Waiting for August, is both a remarkable piece of film-making and a window on the world we live in, indifferent as we seem to be to what is going on.
For once that cliché ‘fly on the wall’ is entirely accurate as Mihai and her dedicated crew observe six months in the daily life of Georgiana, a teenager taking care of six siblings while their mother works as a maid in Italy. Mihai knows all about being left: when she was a child, her parents left Ceausescu’s Romania for Belgium, leaving her behind as a guarantee that they’d return (she eventually managed to follow them). Now, the same thing is happening all over again: she hardly knows any Romanian family of whom at least one member is not an economic migrant, she says.
This is the other end of the ‘Romanian invasion’, and Georgiana’s patience, good humour and self-sacrifice are as heart-warming as they are a shameful testimony to the human realities of modern Europe.
Waiting for August , Cine Lumière, Sun Oct 12, 2.45pm; also Thu Oct 16, BFI Southbank, 6.15pm, bfi.org.uk/lff
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