Romanian director Marius Olteanu (Monsters) is preparing his second feature, We Won’t Get Old Together, a pandemic-set drama about a man struggling to rebuild his life from scratch when everything around him collapses. Olteanu will present the film this week at Transylvania International Airport’s Works in Progress program. Film festival.
“We Won’t Get Old Together” tells the story of Radu, an unemployed architect who finds himself at a crossroads in the stifling silence and uncertainty of Bucharest during the pandemic. Caught between two relationships and faced with a potentially life-threatening diagnosis, the 40-year-old is forced to make a choice he’s put off for too long.
Speaking to Transylvania’s Variety magazine, Orteanu described the film as “a slow-motion journey into an inevitable future” and “horrifying and intense, exciting and yet filled with a constant desire for connection and understanding.”
“I also wanted this to be a journey where dreams, emotions, images, words, lots of words and ideas slowly melt into a mystery about life itself,” he said. “How do we connect and when do we part ways with people who at some point were the central defining pieces of our lives?”
The film centers on Radu, a struggling architect described by Orteanu as “a human museum of broken dreams” who has postponed his long-planned move to Lisbon, where he reunites with his longtime partner Gabi. Meanwhile, despite his career stalling and his future becoming increasingly uncertain, he finds solace in his younger lover in Bucharest. The situation becomes complicated when Radu suddenly finds himself facing a potentially serious illness, but is too scared to face the test results that could decide his fate.
For Orteanu, the character of Radu reflects many of the fears he himself has dealt with as he approaches middle age. “It’s an interesting time for a guy to be 40 years old, where his life and his history are there, and at the same time he realizes that what’s going to happen may not be as interesting or as intense as what he’s been through,” he says. “(Radu) is at a point where nothing is going right and he is wondering what to do with the rest of his life.”
When he started writing the script in 2022, “I was speaking from the same place,” the director added. “You can put things off, but you can’t put things off forever. At some point you have to make a decision.”
We Won’t Get Old Together is Orteanu’s first feature film since 2019’s Monsters. It premiered in the Forum section of the Berlin Film Festival and won the Tagesspiegel Audience Award. In a glowing review, Jessica Kiang of Variety praised the “remarkable debut novel,” calling the “powerful, closely observed three-part study of a loving marriage threatened by social taboos and mutually painful revelations” “wise, thoughtful, and surprising.”
Olteanu once again tackles a social taboo in his new film, this time about homosexuality, which the director says many Romanians are willing to tolerate “as long as it’s between the walls of their apartment.” That belief, along with the conceit of a pandemic lockdown, provides the narrative framework for the film, which is primarily set within three apartments in Bucharest.
“Three apartments, three closed spaces, three lives, one thread that connects them. Radu’s presence, the way he captures reality, reimagines it, confronts it, and finally abandons it,” Orteanu said. “This film is a journey through compromise and unfulfilled dreams, fear and cowardice, and above all, a story about the need to feel safe and loved in a world that seems to be falling apart.”
“We Won’t Get Old Together” is written and directed by Orteanu and produced by Oana Giurju of Bucharest-based Point Film. Co-produced by Martine Vidalenc of French production company Midralgar Films, with sound design by Alexandre Dragomir (12:08 East Bucharest, Police Adjectives) and sound mixing by Bruno Ehlinger (Uncle Boonmee, The Great Graveyard), it boasts a star-studded roster of top talent. Grading was by Andu Radu (The Fjord, The President’s Cake), and VFX was by Thierry Delobel (Bacurau) of France’s Reepost.
The Transylvania International Airport Film Festival will be held from June 12th to 21st.
