Hungarian-Romanian writer-director Cristina Grosan and Slovenian writer-director Olmo Omerzu kicked off the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival’s Industry Section on Sunday with a wide-ranging discussion exploring how they have navigated the complex path from first feature to creating a sustainable career.
“Don’t doubt yourself,” said Grosan, whose sophomore feature Ordinary Failures premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. “It’s important to doubt yourself less and work hard and do the things you want to do as early as possible in your career.”
Grosan spoke about working across her first two feature films almost in parallel due to the pandemic stalling her debut feature film Things Worth Waiting For. That Hungarian coming-of-age drama, which eventually traveled to more than 25 international film festivals (including the Sarajevo International Film Festival), was about a young woman who discovers a dead body while moving out of her student apartment.
“We shot it in 2019 but then 2020 came and we all know what happened,” she said. “So, we were stuck with this finished film and not knowing what was going to happen with it. People at the time were also quite afraid to go to the cinema but I was so proud of it, and I still love it dearly. And while it is a coming-of-age film, it speaks of things in a light way and things that affect us deeply and the fears of the unknown. But I felt that people took it lightly and I got angry and channelled that anger into my second film – Ordinary Failures – which is something existentialist…I channelled that anger into a film about the end of the world.”
Omerzu, whose debut film A Night Too Young premiered in Berlinale and whose sophomore project Family Film also had a strong festival run, pointed to the fact that directors in Central Eastern Europe largely work on European co-productions, which typically take a long time to finance due to the complex financing structures between multiple nations and this, he opined, can have a big impact on young directors.
“The biggest frustration we have is waiting for financing, which can end up taking a year, two years or even longer,” he said. “And it’s very hard to have material that is still accurate and important to you still after waiting such a long time to get the money in place. When I was in my twenties, I know that I wouldn’t have been interested in the same story a few years down the line. Everything is changing so fast and so the biggest challenge I think, for young directors especially, is to get the financing in place as soon as possible, because otherwise, when you are waiting years for the money, it’s possible for young directors to lose their motivation. It’s a real issue.”
Omerzu also called for producers to be more transparent about the financing strategy of productions. “For me personally, I’d love to have more realistic conversations with producers on the budget of the film and how they are financing it.”
He continued: “If a shoot is supposed to be 35 days and then producers get a green light and tell us we have to do it in, say 28 days, if there was more of a dialogue before this, it would give me a chance to rewrite the screenplay in a way that can accommodate a shorter shoot and tighter budget.”
Grosan also touched on her recent work on Daughter of a Nation, a period miniseries she co-directed for Canal+. That project, which marked the French platform’s first original production in the Czech Republic, was a “very advanced” experience for the director.
“It was a great experience, and I don’t think I’ve ever learned as much as I did in all of my filmmaking years as I did on this miniseries,” she said. “While we had the money for the project thanks to Canal+, your problems become very different and you have to be 1000% in so it makes sense, if you decide to explore that format, that you choose a topic that you relate to and a team that you trust because there is a huge level of pressure.”