Romanian director Andrea Cristina Bolsun is preparing a feature film to follow her highly anticipated debut film A River’s Gaze. The drama, produced by Sebastian Stan, is set to premiere at the top film festival next year. Bolshun is pitching his latest project at the Crossroads Co-Production Forum in Agora, the industry sector of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, which will be held from November 2nd to 6th.
“The Life and Times of Aeon G” This work depicts the journey of a man from rural Romania who mysteriously appears in an isolated Roma village one day and searches for the family that gave birth to him and abandoned him. Instead, he forges an unexpected connection with a strong-willed local woman who gives him a glimpse of a love he’s never felt before and forces him to confront his own inability to open up to another soul.
Billed as a “drama with a humorous touch,” the film is a “tender, comedic” look at the incredibly turbulent life of its titular character, a former homeless man who spends nearly 30 years adrift on the fringes of southern European society until an unlikely twist of fate changes his life forever.
“The life and times of Aeon G,” Bolsun told Variety magazine in Thessaloniki. It explores what it means to love and be loved, and considers how emotions are governed not only by personal experience but also by the social and political systems that shape us. “How can we acquire the capacity to love if there are no dynamics or models to help us form it?” asked the director.
Like her short films Blue Spring, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, and When Night Meets Dawn, which premiered at Cannes Directors Fortnight, Life and Times employs a filmmaking process that combines traditional screenwriting with intensive field research.
For each film, the directors spend a lot of time immersing themselves in the communities they’re interested in, “trying to understand how communities function and what stories of communities get told,” Borsan told Variety. At the heart of every project is a real person who serves as the model for her fictional characters, “a kind of ‘living soul’ that fills the paper people with life.”
“Life and Times” is based on the story of a man Bolshun calls “Jojo.” Raised in rural Romania, he left the country at the age of 30 in search of a better future abroad, first in Italy, then in the south of France, and finally spending five years living a mostly uneventful life on the streets of Nice.
When a devastating storm in 2021 hits the Maritime Alps, the mountain range that separates France and Italy, Jojo’s fortunes take an unexpected turn. He became an overnight media sensation after making a charitable donation to help victims of the storm. The mayor of Nice offers him a job as a street sweeper because his generosity has touched the hearts of the public.
andrea christina bolschun
Provided by Sabrina Costinel
Bolshun learned of his unlikely story several years later. At that point, Jojo had a job, an apartment, and legal status in France, but was now far from the public eye. The two corresponded on Facebook, and the director quickly warmed to Jojo’s humor and charm, as well as his willingness to reveal his weaknesses.
“When I first met him, he talked a lot about loneliness and what he suffers from the most. He calls it the worst disease a human being can have, loneliness,” Bolshun said. “Being alone. Not having a partner. Not having a family. What he longed for most of his life was to find someone to be with, someone to share his life with.”
Because Jojo never had the opportunity to meet his biological parents, Bolsun wondered how the lack of a loving home environment during his childhood affected “the way he constructed his image of love” as an adult. He was looking for love, but the director asked himself, “What does love mean to him?”
Channeling the writings of German social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm, Bolschun said, “For most people, love is an emotion, but I was interested in how we could transcend this nebulous feeling. How could we see it as a complex process and what Fromm called art?” she said.
The film explores the “relationship between emotion and politics,” and how Jojo’s inability to express or even feel love, as others know, is always connected to his lived experiences, first as an orphan in communist Romania and then as a homeless man, largely invisible to society and the state.
“He was deprived of his family. He was deprived of an environment of love. You know his deprivation is inevitably tied to the system,” she said. “How do systems affect the way we feel, and especially the way we love others?”
“The Life and Times of Aeon G” explores these questions through the relationship between the main character and his lover Geta, who follows him from the Romanian countryside to Nice. Utilizing a style that Borschun describes as “transcendental realism,” it incorporates genre elements such as romance, dark comedy, and westerns to offer a “humane and playful look at the fate of the peoples who live in the world.”
The film will be the second in a planned trilogy about the Romanian countryside, which also includes “A River’s Gaze” and the third feature, “Egalité.” Bolshun, who has already co-directed a short hybrid documentary about Jojo with filmmaker Philippe Cartelli, said he hopes to begin principal photography on “Life and Times” in the fall of 2026. The film is produced by Gabi Susiu of Bucharest-based Atelier de Film.
Thessaloniki Film Festival runs from October 30th to November 9th.
