Blogpost by Dr. Andra-Octavia Drăghiciu “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions”. On Why the Documentary “Acasă, My Home” Missed Its Chance

Published on 15.09.2025.

I’d like to begin by stating that this article is written in good faith. It’s a genuine attempt to present an alternative perspective to the mountains of praise this film has already received and some suggestions of how, from my particular point of view, the documentary would’ve benefited from a different approach. 

This is first and foremost about the aesthetics of a film which, independently of its makers’ intentions, has been out in the world, generating and reproducing discourse. If I’m being truthful, however, and as you’ll inevitably notice, it’s also about expressing some frustration with the film and its reception. The main issues in this respect are the lack of awareness/transparency about the specific positionality of the filmmakers and how the unbalanced power dynamics contributed to shaping the end product. 

But, before I get ahead of myself, let me put my money where my mouth is and clarify the perspective from which this article is written. I’m a white, middle-class woman who grew up in an academic household in a small Transylvanian town. I have always enjoyed the privileges which come with this positionality, most relevant for the matter at hand being the pursue of an academic education and a scholarly career which have led to my writing this text under the influence of cultural studies, film studies, antigypsyism studies, and critical whiteness studies. I am not part of a marginalized group and therefore my knowledge, thoughts, ideas, and emotions around the topic of racism/antigypsyism stem from academic research conducted by other (mostly white) scholars as well as myself, but also from conversations with racialized people and work with activists from various communities. 

It is through this particular lens that I identified two main reasons why the film Acasă, My Home (dir. Radu Ciorniciuc, Romania, 2020) missed its chance at telling the story of a vulnerable family in a respectful way: 1) ignorance when it comes to cinematic racism and antigypsyism, and 2) the lack of self-reflexivity when it comes to the filmmakers’ positionality. 

In the spirit of constructive feedback, I will briefly discuss both issues and provide some suggestions as to how this could have been avoided/can be avoided in the future. 

1. Ignorance about (cinematic) antigypsyism

Acasă tells the story of the Enache family who left modern life to live in an abandoned green area on the outskirts of Bucharest and is forced to move in order for this habitat to become a protected natural reserve. The film opens with the (borderline dehumanizing) image of a young man holding a fish in his mouth surrounded by the green idylic of a lake landscape bathed in the soft light of what appears to be sunrise, against the backdrop of skyscrapers. From the first seconds, the aesthetic chosen by the filmmakers establishes a contrast: that between “civilization” (where the filmmakers, the politicians, the social workers – in short – the white people come from), and “a natural state of being”, historically associated with groups perceived as non-white.

Dark-skinned, half-naked children are shown playing in a boat and in the grass. A little boy fetches water in a container half his size as they return to rundown lodgings which are surrounded by garbage. The camera then focuses on a middle-aged man lying in the shade and smoking. Next, a woman is shown doing laundry accompanied by two little children in dirty, shabby clothes. As the director puts it in the post-screening Q&A at Ro-Mania Film Festival 2025 in Berlin, we’re faced with an “exotic” family leading a  “Robinson Crusoe” life style. 

Someone who stumbles unknowingly into the cinema might very well think they’re watching an exoticizing Discovery Channel documentary situated in the Amazonas, where landscapes are beautifully presented whereas the people inhabiting them are depicted as fascinating curiosities. The viewer who is aware of the film’s Eastern European connection, however, will immediately read this family as being of Romani ethnicity.

Why? Because throughout the history of art, media and cinematography, this entire ethnic minority, irrespective of the individuality of its very heterogenous members, has been reduced to the figure of the “gypsy”, historically associated with the very tropes we see in the film: proximity to nature, illiteracy, “life outside civilization”, poverty, big families etc., representing a scapegoat for the frustrations, ambivalences, longings, and fears of majority society.

As Radmila Mladenova points out, antigypsyist tropes are omnipresent. We hear about them growing up (especially in Romania), we see them in paintings and read about them in canonized literature, we listen to them in the most iconic songs. They are part of our cultural and national DNA. Also, due to systemic antigypsyism, members of this minority in Romania are most likely to live in the conditions shown in the film. So, even if the protagonists of the film wouldn’t be of Romani ethnicity, most viewers would perceive them as such due to what they have learned to associate with Romani communities. 

Now, in most interviews and statements of the filmmakers, they insist that this is a human story, a story about a family facing struggles everyone has, that them being Roma is not relevant to the film. To quote a spectator during the heated post-screening Q&A in Berlin: „That’s not what the film is about!”  

Rosy as this might sound, it is highly utopic, and counterproductive, as the relationship between white and non-white, in this case between the filmmakers and the protagonists, is that of power imbalance. And let’s not forget: with great power comes great responsibility. 

Whereas I am by no means questioning the good intentions behind the film, it should be no secret (especially for modern filmmakers who might have seen a Kusturica movie or two) that this medium has contributed significantly to the normalization of racism and antigypsyism since the beginning of cinematography (Mladenova). Furthermore, as professionals who pride themselves in having dealt with vulnerable groups throughout their journalistic career, I’d expect the filmmakers to acknowledge, reflect on and share with the viewer the power they yield in portraying racialized people. 

For the racist/antigypsyist gaze is not an individual, but a collective one (Mladenova); it doesn’t lie in the eye of the individual beholder, but is imbued in the very air that animates cultural production. We are socialized in a system that gives one group unearned advantages at the expense of others. This happens unconsciously and we perceive it as normal just like

Bottom line is that, nolens volens, the film is about a Roma family, about members of a racialized minority, of the constructed “other” which European national and bourgeois/middle-class identity has been contrasted with for centuries. And the film does nothing to counter this discourse of otherness, quite the contrary. Filmmakers, international juries, and viewers alike seem convinced that feigning color blindness (the assumption, that one sees people, not color/race/ethnicity) is laudable when in fact it is dangerous. It implies that the very real social construct of race/ethnicity is irrelevant. Sadly, it still shapes everything about the society we live in, and it impacts everyone’s lives: positively, for the filmmakers and most viewers; negatively for the members of the racialized minority this family belongs to. As Layla Saad puts it in a self-reflection workbook I would highly recommend to …well… everyone:

The result of the ignorance regarding cinematographic antigypsyism is a series of scenes which portray the family in the most faithful of antigypsyist aesthetics: A lazy patriarch decides, for unclear reasons, to raise his nine children in the wilderness. He drinks, doesn’t work, and is opposed to education. The children are dirty, surrounded by garbage; the whole family lives in a shabby, unsanitary hut together with various animals. Forced to move to the city, they are portrayed as romanticized wildlings who can’t adapt to city life, perplexed in the face of technology, and unable to run a household. Rather than creating an emphatic bond with the audience, the main emotion that has tears running down viewer’s cheeks is pity.

So how could the situation of this family have been portrayed in a more respectful, non-antigypsyist way? How can you address the poverty many Romani people are forced to live in without reproducing stereotypes?

Even though images are, of course, central to the success of film, some documentaries have sacrificed sensationalism for respect and solved this issue by focusing the camera on the protagonists, rather than on the poverty surrounding them. In the Bulgarian short film Bedroom No. 5 (Dir. Ivan Kulekov, 2015) or in Alina Șerban’s documentaries I am Vanessa (2022) and I am Nicu (2022), for instance, the protagonists are encouraged to speak about their situation, to tell their own story and to describe the poverty and misery they’ve had to endure on their own terms. By doing this, the filmmakers preserved the dignity of their protagonists and resisted placing the viewer in a voyeuristic role. Another technique, used by the makers of the feature film Housekeeping for Beginners (Goran Stolevski, 2023) when filming in Shutka, is to blur the impoverished surroundings and focus the camera on the people in the frame. 

Whereas Housekeeping for Beginners is by no means a perfect movie, one need only compare the posters of the two films to understand what each of them is selling. You can check out my thoughts on Housekeeping for Beginners by clicking on this link:

Acasă, however, insists on this imagery of poverty as well as alienation from modernity and “civilization”, even though interviews with the filmmakers reveal that there were numerous other surroundings in which the children were filmed, such as during a project in which they were given cameras and organized an exhibition. Chances are that in those images we’d see them using those devices independently, blending into the urban landscape, instead of marveling at the washing machine or looking confused and overwhelmed in a bus. Ordinary, not sensational nor marked as the “exotic” other. Using those type of images would have implied agency and complexity of character and would have contributed to a more balanced depiction.

Furthermore, the film would have benefited from giving its protagonists individualizing backstories. Except for the father’s occasional outbursts about how he had had a good job which he chose to leave (why?!), the viewer is given no clear explanation for the particular situation the family finds itself in. It is, again, only by watching interviews with the filmmakers that we learn a bit about the father’s past. Providing his backstory in full would have offered a plausible explanation for him so adamantly denying his children an institutionalized education and for the poverty he chose for his family. It would have also played against the antigypsyist discourse which blaims Romani community representatives for being inherently incompatible with work and modernity.

And what about the mother, you ask? What’s her story? Good question! I couldn’t give you any spoilers even if I tried... 

2. Lack of self-reflexivity

Throughout the 80 something minutes, I had the uncomfortable feeling that, rather than watching a documentary, I was peeping in on a family’s life through a hidden camera of whose existence they weren’t aware. There is no transparency in the relationship to the viewer, no indication that we are not watching an unedited “reality”, but a product filtered through the filmmakers’ perspective, goals, and intentions. And I dare say this is what they were going for: something seemingly raw and “authentic” (complicated story for another time). No breaking of the fourth wall (addressing the audience directly in order to break the illusion/immersion), no reflection on the imbalance of power and on the fact that there are people of a certain positionality, with specific interests behind the camera. 

One way to solve this would be to include clues in the film’s aesthetics that point to the audience that what they are watching is by no means a piece of unfiltered “reality”, but a product of filmmaking; that every minute of the 100hour-plus material was meticulously edited to play into the filmmakers’ narrative, not into the family’s. “The film’s editor, Andrei Gorgan, sifted through four years of footage to piece together the most memorable moments of the family’s journey that made it into the final cut.”^[1] 

At least as far as the viewers know, because there is no indication throughout the film that the images shown have been approved by the people involved, that they were part of the process of deciding how they wanted to be represented.

And this leads us to ways in which the filmmakers’ self-reflexivity could have come across to the viewers: by having the filmmaker talk or show their faces, thus ensuring that the viewer acknowledges their presence, by allowing the protagonists to speak directly to the camera or at least showing them as they watch and approve sequences, techniques used in documentaries such as And-Ek Ghes… (Philip Scheffner, 2016), I am Vanessa and I am Nicu (Alina Șerban, 2022) or Wesley schwimmt (Adrian Oeser, 2024).

Throughout Scheffner‘s film, for instance, the filmmaker’s presence is palpable, thus making it clear to the viewer that “the filmic hero is inevitably a creation in his own image; that the documentary portrait of Coloradu Velcu is literally and unavoidably a reflection of the artist’s personality” (Mladenova).

Interestingly, in his interviews, Acasă‘s director, Radu Ciorniciuc, acknowledges that his portrayal of the protagonists reflects his own inner world especially when it comes to the father, whom he admits he disliked. Moreover, in an interview for the Romanian National Television, the editor and the director talk about how the conflict scene between the father and his eldest son was basically staged. 

Apparently, the son and the father had both turned to Ciorniciuc individually, each complaining about the other. Upon hearing about this ongoing conflict in the absence of the camera, the editor Andrei Gorgan admits to suggesting that it would make good material for the camera (“E un subiect foarte bun, cum putem face…?” It’s a very good topic, how can we get it on camera – my translation and addition, AD). To this end, under the pretext that there was no communication between father and son, and that these conversations “would happen anyway” (“Ceea ce oricum s-ar fi întâmplat. Adică era un lucru previzibil“, Gorgan), assuming the role of mediator, Ciorniciuc went to the father’s house when he knew the son would visit, put a camera on a chair and urged them to talk. In the words of Andrei Gorgan: “A fost puțin mai controlat tot procesul ăsta... filmare, montaj” (This process of filming and editing was a bit more controlled.)

Even though such procedures might not be uncommon for documentaries, the film could have used this level of honesty. Very few viewers will watch the interviews in order to really understand the creation process of the documentary and realise that what they see is actually the filmmakers’ interpretation, shaped by their positionality, intentions, and experience, in short, their reality, and not anyone else’s, because

Speaking of what society can easily comprehend, I think it’s worthwhile to bring the public into the equation and reflect about the reasons why this film has been and continues to be so successful. 

Much like many international antigypsyist reportages about Eastern Europe, the film turns poverty into a spectacle, which makes the viewers (unconsciously) feel good about themselves, as their issues pale in comparison to what they see on screen, creating a mix of reassurance and pity. But why pity and not empathy? Because what is presented to them, that intersection of marginalization based on ethnicity and class, is worlds away from what they themselves experience in their everyday lives, and thus cannot relate to. 

I also can’t help but wonder if the people who see so much love and joy in this film would consent to having their own fathers shown on the big screen at their lowest, drunk, miserable, or ill and exposed in a hospital bed, as Gică is. There is clearly little regard for human dignity in the depiction of this character. 

During the Q&A session in Berlin, one of the arguments presented in favor of the film was that it is “just” a piece of art. Well, art, especially when it is internationally recognised, endorsed by prominent institutions, and given an open stage, is a notable creator and perpetuator of discourse. However, it’s of little surprise that we don’t recognize it as problematic when this discourse plays into the existing racist structures ingrained into our very being (Remember the thing about the fish and the water?). 

If we’re being honest, though, chances are that if you can spare the time, money and energy to watch any movie, this production makes you realize your life is not that bad or that it could be much, much worse. The white saviorism (the impulse to save marginalized people stemming from a sense of superiority) that seems to have been behind the filmmakers’ motivation throughout project (book, foundation, film) is activated, maybe even prompting some viewers to donate to the foundation that helps the family. The question is, however, how this film contributes to the overall image of Romani people in Romania and whether it makes a difference for more than just this particular family (and the filmmakers, of course). But, sure, if you’re not part of a marginalized minority which has been depicted in a racist manner in film since the beginning of cinema, I see how you can afford to see it as “just” a piece of art.

To conclude, I think it’s quite clear that this is not a production we as a Critical Film & Image Hub working on antigypsyism can endorse or recommend. On the contrary. The portrayal of the protagonists is demeaning and undignified and contributes to the spread of antigypsyist stereotypes. The project might have helped a family – which is great, btw. – BUT on a larger scale it enforces the idea that this family and many others are inherently incapable of helping themselves, that it is ok to portray them as the radical “other”, to frame them in a sort of pre-civilization phantasy just to live out your own frustrations with modernity (as can be concluded from the filmmakers’ interviews), projecting own longings and regrets onto them: “E un film despre libertate și despre starea naturală a omului – viața lor e o istorie a civilizației” (Their life is about freedom and about the natural state of man – their life is a history of civilization, Andrei Gorgan). 

Created under the auspices of “the story is not political, but human” and “The story is about people like us in an exceptional situation” (“Povestea e despre niște oameni ca noi care se află într-o situație excepțională”, Gorgan), the film promotes white saviorism under the guise of heartfelt charity. It values sensationalism over respect, giving not only the filmmakers, but also international juries, and viewers who have never and will never find themselves in that “exceptional situation” a chance to feel good about themselves.

Ok… I reckon it did get a bit personal for a moment there. Let me get a hold of myself. (See how easy it is to break the fourth wall?)

In the filmmakers’ defense, this documentary was made a while back, in 2020, when being aware of structural racism, especially in Romania, was not really a thing. Judging by recent interviews and conversations, however, it doesn’t seem like much has changed as they stand by the film 100% (no wonder, considering the amount of work and effort they put into it, as well as the awards and recognition it got). I do hope, however, that critical voices will be heard and acknowledged, and that, for future productions involving members of a vulnerable group, they will consult self-organizations and experts, and maybe even learn a thing or two from Romani filmmakers, as