13/11/2023 - The young Hungarian filmmaker born in Romania discusses her debut feature, a very subtle film about a teacher progressively ostracised

(© Léa Rener/Arras Film Festival)

Unveiled in Toronto Discovery, Without Air [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Katalin Moldovai
film profile], the debut feature from Katalin Moldovai has just participated in the European competition of the 24th Arras Film Festival where we met up with the director.

Cineuropa: Where did you get the idea for the film, whose script you wrote together with Zita Palóczi?
Katalin Moldovai: It’s a true story that took place in Romania where I grew up among the local Hungarian minority. I read an article about this teacher and I thought that situation was absurd. I thought it could be a good topic for a film because it had hidden depths. I wanted most of all to deal with this fear that courses through the entire film because I think that in Romania, in Hungary and in Eastern Europe in general, we lived for a long time under a communist dictatorship and its influence on society doesn’t fade away so easily. When events such as those shown in the film happen, there’s a tendency to recreate that atmosphere, to reproduce it. Of course, one of the main topics of the film is freedom of expression and the oppression that those who express themselves with a personal voice can sometimes face.

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The story centres completely on the main character and on the conformist trap that progressively closes on her, but you also evoke with small touches other subjects such as economic migration or the climate crisis. 
I wanted to show a bit of the personal life of the character, beyond the events at the high school, and what is happening around her. The economic migration that splits families apart is also one of the current problems in Eastern Europe. And climate change is already here, we hear and read many things on the question, but I think that we don’t yet truly realise its magnitude: in the film, we can see that people prefer to focus on other problems that are not really problems at all.

What triggers the teacher’s problems is her suggestion that students watch Total Eclipse by Agnieszka Holland. Why this film in particular?
Simply because this was the film at the heart of the true events. And when we started writing the script in 2019, the question of homosexuality was not on the political agenda and it was only in spring 2021 that the Hungarian government addressed it through a law that is open to interpretation. The situation is now particularly delicate for teachers who struggle to know what they’re supposed to say and how, hence a common sort of self-censorship. 

The teacher at the heart of the issue is progressively abandoned by her hierarchy, her colleagues, friends, students’ parents: it’s a merciless process.   
I wanted to show that when fear begins to spread within a group, even if that group worked pretty well, behaviours change. I find this phenomenon strange, but it’s as if each person was looking to protect themselves and for different reasons; in matters of money, because they have children, because they’re afraid to lose their job, or to maintain a professional position, as is the case with the high school director over whose head floats the Damocles sword that is a grant. That is how fear spreads. And the students are the ones who lose the most in such a situation.

What were your main intentions in terms of visuals?
We searched for the high school to shoot in for a long time and we found it in a small town near Cluj, in Romania. I chose it because it looks like a city from thirty years ago: Nothing has been renovated. In that way, I wanted to evoke the timeless aspect of the topic. I didn’t want the setting to be very realistic while the performances were very realistic. And because the story evokes symbolism with Rimbaud, I placed many discrete symbols throughout the film.

Are you already thinking about your second feature film?
I am currently working on a new script, still with my producer Béla Attila Kovács: it’s the story of a woman who wants to have a child at all costs, while the world falls apart around her. It will be different from Without Air, more philosophical, but with just as many levels of interpretation.

(Translated from French)