Meet the Neighbors
"As a director, I am more interested in creating a universe from scratch than in building a plot around an event from the real world. I believe it gives me the freedom of creating my own rules and as a result a framework which is more open to possibilities and therefore to creativity. I feel that this is one of the reasons I started researching color in the first place, because the paths one could take in exploring this topic are endless.
My research is built upon the idea of describing, through film, something as abstract as color, but without showing it. My choice was to fictionalize color, to create characters based on colors, by giving them a name, a job, fears and failures, friends and enemies, passions and hobbies.
On the set of 'Meet the Neigbours'
My research took the shape of a short film called 'Meet the Neighbors'
The characters in this film: a former Miss Seaside, a retired train inspector, a lonely huntsman, a hipped cook, a lovelorn boyscout and two nonidentical twin sisters are based on the seven colors of the visible spectrum, creating a collective persona. Mr. Grigorescu, the main character, represented by gray, manages to trigger a lot of excitement and drama in the lives of his neighbors.
The action takes place in a small Romanian town, in the mid 80’s, during communism, being a choice of describing color in the most non-colorful period of our national history. By choosing this time setting, I wanted to tell a story about communism, through the point of view of the young generation, who only got to experience it through the eyes of their parents and through stories of their relatives."
Anca Opriou
See Anca's profile