Tata [TIFF 2024] - documentary review (ENG)
11 min to read
Directed by Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc. World premiere on September 8, 2024 at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
Moldova in the 1990s, VHS footage, a little girl with a broad smile reciting a poem about her father who went abroad — these are the opening shots of the first Moldovan film to be screened in the history of TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), a story all too familiar to many of us from that generation of transition in Eastern Europe; the generation that grew up with the seismic shift following the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent democracy that brought anarchy, poverty and lawlessness for at least two decades. This political context created a massive exodus of parents going abroad, often illegally and therefore not seeing their children for years, who in turn were raised by grandparents or single parents.
But Tata is not about politics. At its core it's an incisive and personal documentary that seeks a resolution to the difficult relationship between daughter and father, a relationship that hides in its past violence, fear and justifications rooted in generational trauma. Moreover, it's a story about perspective and the reversal of roles between abuser and victim — when we jump a few decades into the present, Lina's father sends her a video showing visible bodily injuries on his hands. The father, working in Italy, asks his daughter for help.
Lina, talking to her partner (Radu), both journalists by profession, reveals that she hasn't spoken to her father in years, but in the end she is unable to ignore his call for help. The protagonist finds herself at the intersection of personal reconciliation with her father and her journalistic duty to investigate the abuse of migrants and people in vulnerable situations. She never imagined that this kind of abuse would be so close to her family.
In Italy she meets her father, he embraces Lina and kisses her on the cheek, a demonstrative gesture of affection that denotes a certain tension between them. Behind the frame is a spectacular villa — it becomes clear from the context that Lina's father works as a general caretaker in the absence of the wealthy owner, a sort of "handyman" who either cleans the pool, the interior of the villa or tends to the countless shrubs. It's a picturesque scene, like something out of an art movie, a lake looming in the valley, the sun distorting the distant horizon. But Lina doesn't seem comfortable being there, later in the documentary describing the place as causing her claustrophobia and anxiety, "as if the walls are pressing down on me". In such a beautiful and expansive place Lina has become again the little girl of the '90s, who along with her sister and mother stood in solidarity against a man who expressed his love through money sent home, obsessive strictness and violent blows to the woman who bore his children.
In a scene where you can almost smell the stillness in the air, Lina, Radu and dad are sitting at a table inside the villa in the absence of its owner. Eventually, overcoming his emotional rigidity, the father reveals that the owner is psychologically and physically abusing him. He begs Lina to help him, knowing that she is a journalist. But there is still no vulnerability in his plea, rather the tone is one of duty that he expects from Lina. In the world of his generation, the child — no matter the circumstances — is always beholden to his parents. Later Lina decides to help him and endows her dad with a hidden camera at chest level. But in addition to the footage that confirm what the father said — the owner yells at him and physically assaults him — in some of the footage we see her father putting the camera to the side, facing him, in which he pours out his feelings, perhaps for the first time in his life.
In one shot of Lina looking red-eyed into the laptop screen, we see the father addressing his daughter, apologizing for what he's done to her as a child and revealing that in Italy he feels sad and depressed. Probably without consciously realizing it, a role reversal takes place, the man — the abuser becomes the abused and is thrown into the experience of understanding what it's like to be on the other side.
Here and there the documentary is permeated with Lina's narrative voice, explaining certain details or simply revealing her emotions about her father. The narration is intermittent and not overdone. It manages to avoid clichés while still being succint. The directing and editing techniques respect the audience, never forcing an emotion. A good example of "less is more".
The investigation is ongoing, with Lina already appealing to a workers' rights organization in Italy. The evidence recorded in the hidden camera is strong, but the bureaucratic process and the battle between lawyers takes time. The investigation seems to take place over several years and in the meantime we are shown Lina's attempts to explore her not-so-simple relationship with her father.
In one scene we see Lina and her father having a heated exchange. Dad reminds her of his years working in Israel. He was depressed then too, but when he called his family in Moldova "he had a lump in his throat" and tears welled up. Respectively, he chose not to call them often, so as not to confront difficult emotions directly. Growing up in the generation where men don't cry, he chose to stifle his feelings for years and not provide warmth and communication to his daughters. "I didn't just need money, I needed love, a hug, a kiss, to tell me that you love me," Lina addressed him, visibly moved. The father, in response, tried to justify his behaviour, explaining that those were the times, when the priorities were financial and the man's role was to bring bread in the house. This scene is the necessary "trial" between every parent and child. No one is perfect, obviously, but each of us bears the responsibility, as adults, to try to understand and, when necessary, confront our parents in a civil manner.
In another discussion, some time later, the father is visibly more morally prepared to apologize. He's more introspective and empathetic than in other dialogs, understanding where he was wrong. But here the role of the camerawork comes in. Whichever way you put it, the camera is an object that encourages performance, and perhaps Lina's father, while understanding in theory what mistakes he's made, knows what needs to be said in such a situation. This was the moment when the documentary could go off in clichés, demonstrating that all is forgivable and that it's never too late to learn from mistakes. And while there is a dose of truth in that cliché, the reality is more complex than that. Understanding mistakes like this (which have lasted for years) take a lot of time and reflection, on both sides.
Lina and dad come home to celebrate the conclusion of the trial (and the financial remuneration obtained in dad's favor). But instead of the celebration, we see scenes of Lina filming herself in her parents' home, now grown up, sitting on the bed in her room and hearing her parents quarrel in another room, mentally transporting herself back to childhood. The emotional resilience she shows in these moments is likely the result of years of therapy she had long before filming the documentary (Lina had mentioned therapy in the Q&A after the movie's screening). Her father apologized, but part of the apology seems to be transactional in nature — I've apologized, so I can continue to be who I am without changing my behaviour in a deeper way.
But in addition to the personal responsibility that the father has, every person is also a product of historical and social circumstances. This is emphasized several times in the documentary, especially when Lina with her family visits her uncle and grandmother. A conversation between Lina, her mother and her uncle's wife reveals the banality of violence in families from previous generations. The uncle's wife, when asked "Has your husband ever hit you?" replied with ironic nonchalance that "he used to hit me with stones, even chased me out of the house at times", but she has learned to live with it. The loyalty of women of that generation was partly a lack of choice: if you left your husband, you could hardly support yourself, but it was also social ostracization (women who left their husbands were often mocked by the community).
In Lina's conversation with her grandmother, we learn that none of the three husbands in her grandmother's life beat her, because she was a "good psychologist", meaning she knew how to navigate the violent impulses of the men around her. She was part of a line of generations of women who had developed certain defence mechanisms, knowing when it was time to speak up and when it was time to shut up. But violence was pervasive in villages. Her grandmother told of her childhood brother whose leg was broken by a school teacher, the physical trauma was so great that the child died, probably due to lack of proper medical care. The grandmother's father, though deeply affected, chose not to legally prosecute the teacher because "he had children and did not want to leave them fatherless". The casual way in which the grandmother recounted this event only emphasized how common these stories were.
The church also played a considerable role in justifying domestic violence. In one scene we see Lina's father at a confession in front of a priest. Following conversations with his daughter, the father feels guilty for having been violent in the past. The priest listens to him and tells him that before God he has done nothing wrong, "because your daughters did not grow up unruly" and the violent form of discipline has had a positive effect. The priest apparently did not know the difference between causation and correlation. The daughters grew into relatively healthy women despite the violence in the family, not because of it. But neither is the priest exempt from the social environment in which he grew up, an environment that justifies many violent outbursts in men and condemns women's individuality and right to opinion. However, in the Q&A after the movie, Lina had mentioned that Dad had opened up at least a bit emotionally since becoming more religious. Confessions, while they may have hasty conclusions suggested by not-so-intelligent priests, can open a man up to internal dialog, which is better than nothing. After all, they were pseudo-therapy sessions before therapy as such.
Lina's intense longing to be loved by her father is emphasized in other VHS footages, when the little girl shows her notebook with her A's and B's, addressing her emigrant father, his warm body replaced by a recording device that the mother held in her hands. Or in the scenes when Lina and her sister sing and dance on camera for the absent father. Many of us grew up seeing our parents through our cell phones. This inevitable artificialization of relationships in families torn apart by poverty and emigration is so familiar to Moldovans that I don't think I need to add anything to it.
Instead of the love Lina needed, her father was extremely strict. In one shot, Lina recounts how, as a teenager, her father monitored her every hour of the day, analyzing her landline phone call list, and if she spoke to a friend for 30 minutes, he would ask her why she had talked to her friend for so long; in other words, he had "control freak" tendencies, as Lina herself describes it in the documentary. Control freak tendencies, psychologically speaking, replaces anxiety and other more complex emotions. By controlling the people around him, Lina's father was delaying his internal dialog and stifling his conscience.
And yet, despite these shortcomings, the gesture of being vulnerable in front of his daughter, of opening up to the extent of his capabilities, going against generational norms in which emotionality and masculinity were antonyms, offers hope that it is possible to be on the road to understanding and taming a relationship deeply wounded by violence of your own making. In the Q&A after the premiere, Lina realized how hard it was for her father to be so publicly vulnerable. And in answer to the question from the audience, "how do you forgive such a relationship" she said that forgiveness takes time and perhaps she hasn't yet definitively reached that point. The birth of her own baby daughter (and her upbringing screened in the documentary) gave Lina the opportunity to heal her trauma by giving her daughter the love she herself had been deprived of.
The documentary was extremely well received at the premiere, I was pleasantly surprised by its quality and it made me proud of Lina, Radu and their intelligence as people and as journalists. There were, of course, Moldovans and Romanians in the audience, but there were also English speakers who looked affected by what they experienced through the screen (they were reading subtitles, TIFF audiences are used to that). Such movies expose the specific dramas of one country, but from the particular you discover the universal the human condition and all the ways in which we're alike.
Tata is about the realization that the bridge from abuser to victim is shorter than we think, and that vulnerability is the first step in trying to heal a family relationship. Otherwise we will remain eternal strangers woven from the same blood, living a lifetime together but unable to truly listen to each other.
Rating: 9/10