This was one of my real ‘finds’ at Glasgow. It is the first fiction feature of the documentary filmmaker Marta Bergman and was selected as one of the candidates for the ‘Audience Award’ competition. It’s not hard to see why. Marta Bergman was in attendance and she proved a fascinating guest. Alone at My Wedding was screened in the ‘ACID’ (Association for the Distribution of Independent Cinema) programme at Cannes in 2018. This programme features films that might have difficulty finding a distributor and currently this film is looking for distribution via the sales company Cercamon.
Marta Bergman, originally from Bucharest, studied at film school in Belgium and then returned to Romania to make documentaries. This first fiction feature has taken several years to make and clearly draws on the documentary experience. It mixes professional and non-professional actors. The narrative is relatively straightforward. Pamela (Alina Serban) is a single mother in her twenties living with her toddler Rebeca and her grandmother in a Roma community in a village on the outskirts of Bucharest. She has to find ways of earning money to buy food and decides eventually that the only way to survive is to find a rich husband via the internet. This isn’t easy (and requires her to raise money for the fees) but eventually, through an agency, she makes contact with Bruno (Tom Vermeir) in Brussels and agrees to fly to Belgium. She leaves Rebeca behind with her grandmother and tries to make a new life for herself in Brussels, sending the money Bruno gives her home to Romania. I won’t spoil what happens to her (and Rebeca) but I will say that Marta Bergman tells a human story in which some good things happen and Pamela is frustrated in her attempts to ‘get ahead’. Bruno is not a typical man who orders a ‘mail-order bride’, but even when it is clear that he wants the best for Pamela it doesn’t necessarily mean their relationship will work. There are Roma in Brussels and Pamela finds them easily enough. Meanwhile, things are happening in Bucharest where Marian (who might be the baby’s father) is concerned about Rebeca.
The film succeeds partly because Alina Serban is a terrific actor and a bubbling vivacious personality. She appears younger than her 30 years as listed on IMDb and she lives up to the database description of an ‘award-winning actor, playwright and director’. Marta Bergman told us that Alina was primarily a theatre actor but she does have previous film and TV experience. Tom Vermeir is also a theatre actor and he had to develop his Brussels French after working in Flemish theatre. Bergman’s documentary background is evident in the way she makes use of small gestures, some of which have come from observation of families in Bucharest. For instance, early in the film we see Pamela trudging through the snow with a bucket of water because her home has no running water. Later in Bruno’s flat she often leaves the water running, holding her fingers under the flow, revelling in its availability.
I enjoyed this film very much and I hope it gets a UK release. I’d like to show it to students and in the current Brexit climate it provides a powerful story about ‘living abroad’. If I have one slight criticism, it might be that at around 2 hours the film might be too long. By this I don’t mean that the material doesn’t warrant the length – there is more I would want to know – but that perhaps a slightly shorter, tighter narrative might appeal more to distributors? Having said that, I heartily recommend the film as it stands.
The Case for Global Film 