The British filmmaker Marc Isaacs was a special guest of the 18th edition of the One World Romania International Documentary & Human Rights Film Festival (4th to 13th April 2025), where he took part in Q&A sessions after the screenings of his films and gave a masterclass. Marc Isaacs has kindly accepted my invitation to talk about his professional career and his views on the documentary landscape.

Q: How have you selected the seven films produced between 2001 and 2020, presented in a focus section at One World Romania 2025?

A: I sent everything to Andrei (Tănăsescu) and Anca (Păunescu). They came up with their suggestions, and I was happy with that. So, it was quite straightforward. I knew they had four slots, so I could only have four features and some shorts. However, this selection makes sense, because, thematically, the films are quite connected. I can see how they programmed it. I think they were quite keen to show some kind of evolution. I’ve been making films for such a long time (it doesn’t feel like so long to me, but when I think about it, it’s 24-25 years), so I believe they also wanted to think about how society has changed and how different questions came up at different times. Therefore, it makes sense to me how they’ve done it.

Q: John Grierson, the father of British documentary film, defined the documentary as a “creative treatment of actuality”. Do you agree with this definition?

A: It’s a phrase I’ve thought about a lot. I do. I’ve always found the actuality, or you can call it reality or observation, not through any kind of pre-planned method or too much thinking about it before, but just from making the film. I’ve always felt that there’s only so far that you can go with observation. I’m not the kind of filmmaker that stands in a courtroom, observing where there’s drama all the time. For me, the question of how to intervene in reality and provoke things that I’m interested in exploring, using creativity to bring that to the screen, has been really important. So, it makes total sense. I don’t know what Grierson would think about my films if he were alive. It’s fascinating that, if you think about the Lumière brothers and their Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), I think that was shot like three times, and even once during the summer, when they brought the workers back to the factory, which you can tell because they’re not tired and it’s summertime, the factory was closed, and they look different. So, even from the very beginning of the documentary, there’s always been the question of how to film reality and how much intervention there is. I am really fond of this. In a way, I believe that you should place your subjective stamp on your films. That’s for me the enjoyment of it.

Q: Regarding Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, in the second part of Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), the cameraman argues that, when the Lumière brothers shot a second take and started directing the workers, the fiction film was born…

A: Yes, and the same happened with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), with the rushes being destroyed and the director having to go back to reshoot. So, in a way, this kind of hybridity has been there from the start.

Q: Before making Lift (2001), your first major documentary film, you worked twice as an assistant director with Paweł Pawlikowski. Has his directing style influenced you when you started making your own films?

A: He influenced me massively in different ways, but not so much in his directing style. Before I started working with him, he made some films that were very hybrid, mixed, but much more closer to what I’m doing in a way, with less budgets than the ones I worked on with him, or at least much less than his Last Resort (2000), which was not a high budget film, but it was still over 300,000 pounds. We were working in quite different contexts, and he was very inspiring because before that I’d worked with some BBC people making documentaries in very traditional ways. They had like 16 filming days. You could spread it out over a long period, but there were still 16 days, and that was it. They were shot on 16 mm film, with a camera assistant, a sound assistant, etc. By the time you get everything set up and you’re in somebody’s life, it forces you to a kind of formal, conventional way of filming, because you can’t just react to stuff. When I was working on those films, for research, one of my jobs was to find the characters. I used to take a little Hi8 camera out with me to film, so I could show the director the people I met. And I became fascinated with that, because I realized that the stuff I was filming just for research was very much more alive in a way. I could film things that you could never film with a crew, because I could just hang around, it was cheap to press the “Record” button, I had all the freedom in the world. After that, the camcorders became acceptable broadcast quality. So, that was a very important development. With Paweł, I think what I learned was the freedom to not follow tried and trusted ways. So, it was a bit like a film school for me. I don’t think I would have been very good at film school, because when you go there, you learn about the history of film, and this could be very overwhelming. You start asking yourself: “Should I choose to make a film like this or in this style?”. I wasn’t even aware, when I made Lift, of what observation really meant. I hadn’t seen loads of films before. It was through that film that I discovered much more of the kind of mainly European film culture: films from Poland, Romania, Serbia, and other places. But yes, I think I just found my own way of doing things. This was a kind of accident, you know.

Q: How do you manage to obtain this extraordinary level of intimacy and trust in your subjects, which is evident in your films?

A: My starting point is usually like: “OK, I’m going to make a film in a lift, or in a town, or I have some themes in my head”. But it doesn’t really come alive for me until I go and meet people, and start talking with them and thinking about how their stories might relate to the themes I’m interested in. In the beginning, when I meet these people, I just talk to strangers; it’s really an encounter with strangers. And the trust comes through time, through the process. However, it’s a strange relationship, because, even if I’m not taking the camera out with me when I’m doing research (sometimes I am), the camera very quickly becomes part of the relationship, and I have to feel that I can understand why the person might want or accept to be filmed. For those that don’t, these conversations end in the research phase. Sometimes I might start filming with somebody, but then I can feel that it’s not going to work, so I stop quite quickly. However, the ones that do want to be filmed are not desperate to be filmed, but they also enjoy it, and through the process, they feel like they have something to say. Then, intimacy comes, because I think from the very beginning, I’m asking them about their personal lives. I’m not asking them about the subjects. It might be my way into talking to people: “What do you think about the changes in your area?”. But I’m not really interested in people’s opinions. So, very quickly I’m asking about themselves and their lives. I think they, through this process, understand this. I think if you ask people about their lives, some people want to share that and it happens, it’s not necessarily something worked out before. But then there are people who are interested in people’s opinions, and they like to make films about their subjects. I’m much more interested in people than ideas. The idea is the bigger framework, but it’s through the people that I’m trying to get to that.

Q: Do you always select your characters based on a theme, or the space, the environment in which they live (e.g., Calais: The Last Border – 2003, All White in Barking – 2007, or Men of the City – 2009)? Do you sometimes start with a person and decide to make a film about that person?

A: This is usually the first way around. Most of my films I started with some ideas. I think it’s very useful to have a physical frame for a film, like a place. It came out of making Lift, and I discovered that that was actually a very useful limitation, just sticking in that place, and, as soon as you stay there, the audience knows you’re not going anywhere. It focuses things. And I like having that frame, that kind of staging, and that setting. However, I have made one or two films about a person. But it was by accident, in a way. The producer I’ve worked with for many years, she once said: “I was speaking to my cleaner yesterday, and she told me she was one of seven wives living with a rabbi”. This was in London. She said: “You should go and talk to him”. And I was like: “Yeah, maybe”. I wasn’t that bothered, because I’m not really interested in sensational things. However, I did go and talk with him, and I thought his whole set-up in his house was quite interesting. I could see that there was a film to be made there that, through this family, was really looking at questions of power, relationships, and so on. This felt like a microcosm for other things. I ended up focusing more on the wives, because they were kind of more interesting than him, as he had his mind made up about who he was. And the wives were in much more doubt, because he was quite brutal as well, like a cult leader. So, mainly it’s like thinking of these themes, finding a form, finding a shape to the film that can come through a setting. My house is one, you know, in The Filmmaker’s House (2020). I think it’s important to sort of build a visual world for the film to unfold. It’s not happened every time, I can also be loose with that, because I don’t want the formal things to become a bad limitation. As in Calais: The Last Border, for example, some of the characters I film are in very specific locations. The English bar owner, Paul, is usually in his bar. The Afghani migrant, Ijaz, is usually in the world of the refugees. And the Jamaican guys are always in one space, apart from the end scene. Therefore, all the characters had their own locations, but then I decided to film with Tulia. Her place in the town was a bit different, because her life was going out to people, and she was running her business. So, I went where she went. In a way, she represented a different side of that town, because she was settled there. All the other characters were passing through. I was also happy to break some rules: “OK, she can be more fluid”. But then I arranged for her to meet the English bar owner…

Q: So, you had arranged that meeting between them…

A: Yes, it was arranged. He knew someone was going to come to talk with him. He didn’t know what it was about, because I wanted to maintain spontaneity. I asked her to come there and try to sell her advertising services to him. So, I’ve set this up without telling everybody everything. There’s a good example of being loose within that scene, because there’s a kind of homeless guy that comes in and asks for money, as the scene sort of settles down. He comes in and says something about the town. And I filmed that. I’m not constricted by my own rules that I might have set up. That would also be silly not to allow for accidents, the unexpected, which is fascinating when it happens. It happens a lot where I have ideas like: “OK, tomorrow I’m going to go and film this person, I’m going to do this scene, I’m going to put them there”, and I arrive there and something else is going on, which is more interesting than what I’d imagined.

Q: Speaking about the individual portraits in your films, I was curious whether that story in The Filmmaker’s House about that man that you shot on videotapes and murdered his wife is true…

A: Well, it’s a true story, but I changed the details slightly. He actually murdered his children, but I thought telling everything was too much for the film, so I changed it a bit, not making it completely factual. However, this is a true story. It was before I made Lift, when I was still a researcher working with other directors. I was a bit bored while working at the BBC. I was researching for films, and everybody was looking through newspapers for stories. That was how people used to find stories, and I was bored by this. I remember leaving the office earlier one day and going on the tube in London, and I was reading the free newspaper on the train. And it had a little paragraph about this guy who had woken up on the streets of London, and he lost his memory. He didn’t know who he was. That sounded really interesting, and I thought: “OK, I should maybe just go and see what this is all about”. I managed to gain access to speak to him. I took a camera from the cupboard at the BBC and just started filming him. A few days later, I showed it to the commissioning editors that I was working with. They found it interesting, and they said: “Carry on, let’s see where it goes”. He genuinely had amnesia, but at some point, his memory returned, and then he lost it again. It was a very weird story. I filmed him for like a couple of months. I found that he came from Israel, so I went back to Israel with him. I found a small message and a piece of paper with a phone number. His friend answered, and he said: “Bring him back”. Anyhow, it’s a long, complicated story. I came back to London a couple of weeks later. He’d been separated from his wife and children, but he went to meet them in a court area where he could have access to them, which was supervised. When the social worker who was supposed to supervise their meeting left the room, he poured petrol and set fire. When this happened, it was really shocking. I have at home this box of tapes that have never been edited. The VHS is of the master tapes. I thought it was interesting to bring him to the frame of The Filmmaker’s House, because the film was all about these strangers encountering each other and the figure of the homeless guy being like the ultimate stranger to whom I offer hospitality. I thought that including that story in the film would be interesting, and it was real. There’re all those people in the film who are kind of playing themselves, but they are also who they are within a certain fictional framework.

Q: Speaking about The Filmmaker’s House, Steve Rose from “The Guardian” asserted that your “playful work” in that film is “a little too at home with manipulation”. Do you think that this remark is justified?

A: For me, all film is manipulation, it’s just a question of degree. You can’t just film reality, there’re always decisions. You can call them decisions or manipulations, but you’re not how you started. You know the conversation between observation, actuality and creativity. Some people watch The Filmmaker’s House from the very beginning and realize: “OK, this is being playful”. Other people watch the whole film and don’t realize that it’s all set up until the point where I reveal it. That was the point of the film for me, as well as having the subject of the host and the guests and all the themes around hospitality. For me, it was also about the filmmaking process. Referring to the second scene, where I’m talking to my producer about everyone wanting serial killers, which is a kind of real thing, I wanted to bring in the reality of my situation, and not just mine, but of many filmmakers. How can you make a film not dictated by other people? Because every film has an industrial context of what’s going on in the industry, what can be done, what can’t be done, etc. So, for me, it was like I couldn’t just go out and make films in the way that I’d made them before, because they were quite expensive to spend a year researching. This is a different process. So, I was thinking about how to bring things to me, but also to include in that frame the whole question about documentaries being manipulative and self-deprecating with it. Throughout the film, I understood that I was also a character in it. And you are always a kind of character, because even in Lift, when people ask me stuff, I mediated my response. I become a character, but I want to think about what kind of character I am. So, sometimes, I don’t respond to people, because for me, it would spoil the scene. In The Filmmaker’s House, it was about playing with the idea of what the figure of the documentary filmmaker is, as well as the figure of a homeless person, or the English stereotype builder, or the Pakistani neighbour. I then twisted those things around a bit, raising questions about them. So, he’s right. And yes, I was at home with that because I was happy to do it, but it’s actually problematizing documentaries and how we see them. Because we want to believe everything’s true. If it’s a documentary, it must be true, right? However, I think that’s really dangerous. When you watch a film, I believe it’s really important to also read it and understand how you’re being manipulated. Even if it’s the best film, this doesn’t matter. It’s crucial to be aware of what you’re watching, especially now in the world in which we live. This seems to me to be really important. As a member of the audience, you can decide whether you’re happy to be manipulated like that and why. The why for me was quite clear, but I wanted to raise this question for people to think about. So, it’s kind of contradictory in a sense. I thought this was really interesting and complex. There is a sense that documentary makers always want to be good guys, do good for the world and be leftists, and always do humanistic things with people. However, I’ve been around long enough to know that all filmmakers want to make a good film and sometimes they have to manipulate their characters to make that film. This is not an easy process. Let’s talk about that, that was my thing, let’s think about that as well. And maybe we shouldn’t clean it up, it shouldn’t be either good or bad, it’s complicated.

Q: What are the limits? Which is the highest degree of manipulation that can be imposed when you are working not with professional actors playing fictional characters but with real-life people playing themselves?

A: That’s for the filmmaker to decide. For me, it comes back to why you’re doing it. It’s a bit abstract because it’s hard to say, but I wouldn’t of course do certain things with real people, like I wouldn’t film a sex scene with non-actors, even if people wanted to do it. I remember, for example, Anna, an Italian film from 1975, made by Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli in a cinéma vérité style, in which the filmmaker ends up sleeping with his female subject. When I’m working with non-actors like in the kind of films I’ve done lately, as well as in the film I’m doing now, where there’s a fictional premise, there’s a different process than in my other films. In the very beginning, I can say to them: “Look, it’s a fictional premise and you’re playing both yourself and not yourself, and there are things that we’re writing in the script for you, but you can improvise”. So, they understand from the very beginning it’s the two things at once, it’s somehow both fiction and documentary. However, this doesn’t mean that you can do anything. It would be unfair to do some things with real people, compared to actors. It’s very abstract, because I have to think about what I would or wouldn’t do. I think of this when something comes up. But I think that, because they are real people, you’re thinking about this from the very beginning. You don’t go far out and think they can do anything for your film. For me and the writer I work with, it is important that our ideas come from that person. I wouldn’t think: “OK, I’m going to film with you, but it’d be great if you were trans”. No, I would find a transgender person interested in that kind of story. Thus, the process of working with real people is very different. You’re not starting from scratch. With actors, some directors cast certain kinds of actors very specifically because they want to draw on a persona they’ve created, such as Robert De Niro. In my case, you have to respect that they’re not professional actors. It’s a bit hard to think about where the limits are, but I think the limits are inherent in the actual difference. In a film I made that was not shown here, called This Blessed Plot (2023), the builder character in The Filmmaker’s House, the English guy who’s doing the fence, plays something that both is and isn’t in the film, it’s very mixed. But he also quotes Shakespeare to a Chinese filmmaker that’s filming him. And that’s something that we thought was really interesting, because it’s something you never see in films that a working-class builder guy would suddenly start quoting Shakespeare. Actually, that’s where the title, This Blessed Plot, comes from, it’s from “Richard II”. And that was really interesting to see him do that and the Chinese woman’s reaction to it. She sings him a national song because she wants to give him something back. Pushing the limits in a fun or provocative manner in another sense could also be interesting. At the moment, I’m making a film in which the main question is what’s happening to the human face in cinema because of AI. The whole film is based around an AI lab. They’ve employed me to work with them because they want to understand how to make their synthetic characters more believable. Therefore, they take all my films and analyse them so they can understand how to create synthetic characters. That’s the premise for it, and all the people I’m working with are AI researchers, except for one who is a former student of mine who I’ve put into that situation. It becomes very interesting because you don’t really know that she’s not, even if she looks a bit different from the others, she doesn’t have that kind of nerdy computer obsession, but at the same time, she’s very convincing. I guess when you first encounter her, you might not know, or maybe you just accept that she is who she’s saying she is, or we’re saying she is. She’s from Lebanon and, at some point in the filming process, she was telling me about her grandmother, who had to be evacuated from Beirut because of the bombing. And I thought: “OK, we should do a scene about this”. So, we created a kind of fictional moment where she’s calling me up saying: “You must come around, I want to talk to you”. She then tells me this story about her grandmother and what’s going on for her in Beirut. It’s a very human story, and it works really well against all the synthetic stuff that’s going on. I’m currently in the editing phase. You know that the whole film is being staged, but the lab is real, so it feels very convincing. So, it’s again very mixed, but there is a point when something happens, and she gets investigated by the institution she’s working for. There’s a character who’s a Chinese Uyghur, one of the persecuted Muslims from Xinjiang province. In the fiction, the lab people say: “Can you go out and get some data from somebody that doesn’t look so Western?”. He’s a friend of mine who owns a restaurant on the corner of the road, and I’ve asked him to be in the film. Lin, the woman from Beirut, goes there and I’m filming the data, but she’s directing it: “Can you film his face? Can you film him laughing, crying, etc.?”. In any case, when the laboratory finds out that we’re working with a Uyghur guy, they get scared, because they are worried about losing all Chinese students from the university. It’s now a big thing in England that the Chinese students fund the universities, they pay overseas fees. So, she gets investigated. However, when that happens, we start the scene a bit like in The Filmmaker’s House, where you see some kind of rehearsal before the scene, before we fall into the fiction of the investigation. Therefore, it’s clear what’s going on. I cast Lin in the film because she was an interesting character. When she was my student, she was always quite interesting, so I thought she’d be good and convincing in that world. I also knew that there were interesting things to explore in her life. They’re also interesting in the context of the AI world, with the Israeli army using AI in war, raising such questions. And the Uyghur guy is somebody that I’ve known for a little while and I wanted him there because he has an amazing face, and he hides his emotions, so I thought he’d be great in this film. He’s carrying all this past, he has no connection with his mother, because all the messages are intercepted and read by the authorities, so he has to be very careful. And he conceals his emotions. In the context of making AI, it was very interesting to have him in the film. However, it wasn’t worked out until we’ve filmed a bit and started to think about it. What we’ve ended up doing in the film is a big scene in which the lab presents their AI version of him to an audience. It’s real footage, but we’ve just affected it a bit, so you don’t quite know whether it’s real or not. And for an audience, when we set it up, we say to the audience that it’s an AI. However, because of the whole framing of the film of this kind of experiment, you might not know if it is or isn’t AI. Some of the AI stuff is not very good, but other stuff is incredible. If I just show you this image of an old man in a café, without telling you, you might look at it a few times and not quite be sure. It’s actually AI, made from just a text prompt, and this was even one year ago, so it’s old now, meanwhile it probably got even better or even more convincing. It’s hard to tell the difference between AI and real objects. And soon, it’s going to be impossible to tell the difference. What does that mean? So, we’re playing around with all those provoking thoughts and questions. What’s happening to the human face? I start the film with early daguerreotypes, some of the first photographs. At that time, in a way, the face belonged to the rich because, if you wanted, you could either be painted by somebody or you had to have money to be photographed. The camera democratizes everything because all the people start to be filmed, and now it’s being taken away by AI. It’s like the death of the camera, the death of the location, etc. This is fascinating for me to think about and what it might mean for the future of cinema. Who knows? I don’t want to prophesize about what’s going to happen, but it’s really interesting to think about where we are. In terms of cinema, a whole new language is probably going to be created.

Q: As a director, have you considered moving towards fiction films?

A: You know, one of the reasons why I’ve always done what I’ve done is because, even when I was making films with good budgets for BBC, I always had freedom. The film industry in the UK is so bad that if you come up with really original ideas, you won’t get money. This has to be like what they see as popular. I don’t have the patience to go through the whole process of writing a script for five years, for somebody to say no 20 times. I’m quite happy to be in this space where I make films cheaply but still have independence. If someone gave me half a million pounds and said: “Do something”, I probably would. I’m not desperate to do it, it’s not like I feel like I’m doing this as a second best. I think every filmmaker has their history and context and this context is for me. However, I’ve always thought it could be interesting to direct in a theatre. I thought about some of the films I’ve made, such as When Night Falls (2016), which shows men sleeping in their trucks. I could imagine three trucks on a stage, with men inside them. But I’m quite impatient when it comes to applying for funding and stuff like that, because it always comes with more these days. In the UK in the ’60s and ’70s, there was a great deal of freedom. We had this beautiful TV series called Play for Today, with one-hour plays, written, for example, by Harold Pinter, made into so many interesting films. I could totally imagine myself doing one of them. But those directors were so free, and that’s how they learned their craft. The context is so boring now, and British films are quite bad. Only one or two good films come every year. We don’t have the foundations you have here, like I imagine with Radu Jude, they probably let him do what he wants, more or less. But even if you’re a well-known filmmaker in the UK, they still want to control everything. Our culture is risk averse. We’ve never had this communist or socialist history. There was a time when it was much better, but there was never a sense of cultural money in the same way. We’re much closer to the United States. I feel the difference when I talk to people in France, Denmark, or Scandinavia.

Q: Do the bonds between you and your subjects persist after the completion of the film? Do you sometimes keep in touch with your characters?

A: Yes, with some people. This Blessed Plot is very interesting for this. Keith from The Filmmaker’s House is in This Blessed Plot as well. Susan from All White in Barking plays a ghost in This Blessed Plot. Norman, who’s in the Men of the City, the big guy who’s smoking cigars, plays Keith’s brother-in-law in a couple of scenes in This Blessed Plot. So, sometimes people come back to other films playing different things. So, yes, I keep in touch with some, but with most of them, not. Of course, some died. I don’t know what happened to some of them, like Ijaz or Paul in Calais: The Last Border. I also lost contact with Tulia from that film. So, you know, people come and go.

Q: You like to use original music in your films. What is your opinion on the use of music in documentaries?

A: It’s not always original. In this film I’m doing now, I’ve got two Lebanese tracks. But yes, it’s mostly original. I love music in films. Sometimes I think I’ve overused music, sometimes I really like it. I’m not a great musicologist, so I don’t always know what’s going to be right. This Blessed Plot it is also very interesting because Gustav Holst lived in the town where the film was set, and he composed “The Planets” in that town. I used all of his music in the film. And it just works. Sometimes, I just put something down and it’s beautiful. It’s very different for different films, but it really adds something to that film. There’s a church in that town that was run by a Christian socialist. This is a significant theme of the film. Holst was close to him, and they were both part of the Christian socialist world. So, this makes real sense. It was sort of a gift. It was all free.

Q: Some of your films are commissioned by the BBC or are included in BBC documentary series. How do you work with commissioning editors and programmers?

A: I don’t work with them anymore. Because they just want you to do what they want. There’s nobody to talk to, or to have any kind of conversation. They’ve all gone; they’ve all left. The culture’s completely changed. So, I now make films very cheaply. A bit of money here, a little bit from there, but without interference. Yes, it works like this. When you’re making a film where you know the money’s coming from television, this is always in the back of your mind. I never found it restrictive, I just knew that at some point the commissioner would come and watch the film’s cut, and there would be some conversations like: “Is this going to work for the audience?”. I don’t have to think about this now. I do think about the audience but not in the way that a TV commissioner would think about. They always think that they know their audience. Which I always thought was bullshit, because when Play for Today was being made, my mother and father, who were like uneducated peasants in a way, would watch it because it was the only thing on television. There’s no chance now for people to stumble across stuff because the broadcasters think all they want is reality shows. I’ve always found it very patronizing. And that kind of exposing people to things they wouldn’t see, like interesting cultural works, is gone, that culture’s gone. My context is completely different now. So, I think about the audience in terms of feeling an obligation in my work to give the audience something new or challenging, not to just repeat the same tricks.

Q: When working on a documentary, do you like to be the cameraman, or do you do so because you want to keep production costs down or not to lose the intimacy and trust with the subjects that I mentioned before?

A: I started off filming myself and I just continued because there is the question of intimacy. When I’m filming, I never look at the screen of the camera. I’m always looking down the lens. It’s really important to me, that kind of directness. It feels very alive to me. It is also a budget question, but I’m not frustrated by that, because I’ve always done it the way I do it, and I feel very happy to do it like that. It’s part of the idea as well, it’s what’s going on. However, in this new film, I have to be in the opening few scenes, because I go to the lab and present myself to the AI researchers and show them characters and do a little presentation, so somebody else is filming that. But I prefer to shoot myself.

Q: You mentioned that when making Lift, you started watching films from all parts of Europe, including Romania. Are you familiar with the Romanian documentary scene or Romanian cinema in general? Which filmmakers or films had an impact on you?
A: It’s not as much Romania; it’s more Poland actually. Because I remember that Lift went to some Polish festivals, and I, for example, discovered the work of Marcel Łoziński. I knew before a little bit of Krzysztof Kieślowski and his fiction films, but I also discovered his documentaries. For instance, I saw Łoziński’s amazing film Anything Can Happen. When I saw that, I was like: “Wow!”. I also found some similarities when I began to dig into Eastern cinemas. There are some Czech films that I really like, such as those of Jan Spáta. There is also an Israeli filmmaker called David Perlov, whose Diary is my favourite piece of work ever made. If I had to go to an island and have just one thing, I would take the Diary series. I love that. I haven’t seen all Radu’s films, but I really loved Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. I also remember a film not made by Romanians, but about two Romanian street kids, Gigi, Monica… and Bianca (directed by Yasmina Abdellaoui and Benoît Dervaux, 1996). It’s a documentary, but it’s also like an Italian neorealist film. The cinematographer Benoît Dervaux ended up working with the Dardenne brothers. It’s really amazing, very beautiful, with great characters followed over a long time. It’s a kind of homeless love story. In 2023, I was in the Romanian competition jury of the Astra Film Festival in Sibiu, so I got to see some more recent documentaries. This was quite interesting. There weren’t so many good ones, but there were a couple of films I liked, such as the one about Nora Iuga (Why Do They Call Me Nora When the Sky is Clear, by Carla Maria Teaha), or Amar, by Diana Gavra, about a pickpocket, which wasn’t cut well, but it was really interesting; I think they were going to recut it.