Film Director

Carmen Lidia Vidu's film combines the documentary technique with the collage and animation technique.

2022
I am Her. Healing Stories, documentary
"I AM HER. Healing Stories" is a short film about individual experiences in times of pandemic, bringing to the forefront stories told by women. It is a glimpse of what this pandemic was or could have been like on an individual level, it is an invitation to reflect, to recall the transformative or mundane moments of this period. What did we do day by day? Who did we meet? Who was close to us?What did we fear? Where and in what did we find joy? In 2020, when the world went into "Pause" mode, each of us set off on a race to find inner balance, under the spell of an infinity of mixed emotions.
2022
The Factory, documentary
A day's work at the Factory. I spent a day among the workers, at 6 a.m. they got off the bus, they punched in at the entrance, I drank my coffee at the table with them, the workers put on their coats and started work. The film "FABRICA" is about the fluidity between the ballet of hands at the weaving mill, the powerful machinery, the large number of workers, the massive machinery. In the factory, work has no gender, it's neither masculine nor feminine, it's work, and that's the only honest thing I can say about women's relationship to work. The factory is the fluid boundary between masculine and feminine, fragility and harshness, between a space that holds the past and one that seeks the present.
2021
#newTogether
During the lockdown that followed the outburst of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Bucharest invited 60 artists from both countries to talk about their own future, as well as about the transformations their art could undergo during this period and after the end of the health crisis. The short videos they sent were posted on the ACF Bucharest and Radio România Cultural pages on the social networks. Very quickly, they caught the attention of tens of thousands of people in both countries. Based on this success, the ACF Bucharest team decided to entrust to the locally very well-known Romanian film and theater director, Carmen Lidia Vidu, the production of a documentary gathering excerpts of all these artists’ videos. #newTogether is a necessary project. It's a form of dialogue in isolation; it's a testimony about the Zero Moment. Our fragility, vulnerability and fear became a universal language that we all spoke in 2020, the year of the covid-19 pandemic. People isolated themselves, time stood still and a "newtogether" began.
2020
”1989. The Diary of a Revolution”
The film "1989. The Diary of a Revolution" is based on interviews with actors whose unfiltered opinions, whether personal, civic or social, are intertwined to provide the “bigger picture” of a historical event. Besides the confessions of the actors, the film includes interviews about Security, Ceaușescu Trial, Revolution, Terrorists with historians from Romania, UK and USA. “Denying the Revolution is like deleting the faith of an entire people in itself, the belief that anytime it has the power to go out in the street and to change a political system, the way it did in 1989. The people went out in the street in order to change the dictatorial communist regime, with the risk of getting shot. Even more of them went out when they started being shot. Denying the value of the people's actions who went out to protest in the conditions when they risked being killed and in the conditions when they actually got killed, denying the importance and the impact of their courage means denying the importance and the impact of their courage means denying the courage of a people and this is the form under which the crimes against humanity start. In 1989 the political regime in Romania changed because the people went out in the streets”, the director Carmen Lidia Vidu said.
2019
My Romanian Diary / Mein Rumänische Tagebuch
History in lower cases.
Daniela Török shares with us her flicker in that broader history we are living, she brings forward her experience living through the Romanian Revolution, of dealing with sexual discrimination, the limbo that is emotional and psychological abuse within relationships, whether romantic or otherwise, about our relationship with our parents, but also about her work.
She brings to light darker aspects of the world she lives in, animals killed for the thrill of it, the lack of safety women experience day to day just walking down the street, the financial insecurity we are all more or less faced with, the lack of future prospects for the youth, and the elderly retired.
Many women will see themselves in this diary. They will feel at ease.
“My Romanian Diary” is a means to start a conversation, an invitation to dialogue.
We risk becoming irrelevant to our community.
We live dangerous lives, letting vanity guide us and lead us into isolation.
We no longer listen to opinions that do not confirm our own.
2018
My Faith Story
In memory of the grandfather, Ghiță Vidu from Socolari. A dialogue between reality, faith, biography, family and fantastic. In memory of the grandfather, Ghiță Vidu from Socolari. The film represents a very personal story about faith. A story about the relationship with God, brought from the village of Socolari, the village of the artist’s grandparents. Private stories about people, times and events are told, moments which reinforced or tested the faith, stories about how could faith move mountains if it would be enough. Each story of this film has a very deep personal weight, it comes from a direct genealogical line, they belong to the family. This short film to be seen as you would be walking along the alleys of the village of Socolari and there, you would meet the artist and have chat about faith.
2017
Romanian Diary. Muslim Diary
Turchian Guzin Nasurla is the only Tatar woman in Constanta. For her life is an eternal commute between hospital-theater and Romanian-Tatar. The woman who asserts that the minority is only needed in electoral campaigns, then no one listens to them, although the different ones are so revealed and given, starting with the Muslim religion, a religion of love, to the traumatic experience of working in a country, a hospital and the wonder to wake up healed only at the theater.
2016
ARAD. My Virtual Diary
Short Documentary
Carmen Lidia Vidu, the first Romanian multimedia theatre director, grew up in Arad, a city at the border of Western Romania. After leaving Arad for Bucharest 15 years ago, she returns and makes a cinematic documentary experiment about the people and places from her childhood. She is the protagonist of a virtual journey throughout time, compressed into one day. The skate park, the flea market, the bicycle ride on a path in the forest, the local church, playing board games with old people in the park. Miss Arad and beauty, her neighbor and best friend Cristi, her father’s auto repair shop, the tram, karate, the theatre, the Philharmonic, the mermaid by the pool. Real and surreal moments, part from her memory, part from her imagination, seeing as the adult through the child’s eyes, moments that shaped and contributed to Carmen’s development and career, ARAD. My Virtual Diary is a visual journey and a story about growing up, love and nostalgia.
2016
Constanta. A Dancing City
“Constanta. A Dancing City” is an atmospheric film, a combination of Cuba and a small town on the west coast of America, of a port, a town and barren hills, a lot of ethnic groups, numerous dancing styles, all brought together in a short film produced by Carmen Lidia Vidu, who was born at the other end of the country. It is a fifteen-hour train journey from Arad (the director’s birthplace) to Constanta. Constanta is not just a holiday destination, it is much more than that. It is the place where you give your dreams total freedom, where water, dancing, buildings, almost naked bodies, and music join in a sensuous story. “Constanta. A Dancing City” is a kind of Dirty Dancing of Romania to the rhythms of rock and roll.
2015
Bucuresti. A Word by Ion Barladeanu and Carmen Lidia Vidu
ARCUB
Ion Bârlădeanu is already an iconic figure, known worldwide as a homeless art-world darling starring in Alexander Nanău’s documentary, The World According to Ion B. Carmen Lidia Vidu portrays him as a unique soul who ingenuously asserts his obsessions and favorite things found in Bucharest. Through editing she captures fragments of his digressive desires and memories, emphasizing his mercurial personality joined by a significant number of real and fictional figures which exist in his famous collages. She reaches his iconography following his artistic direction swamped in irony and social critique. The collages he puts together are his own films but Carmen succeeds to create a moving collage placing him in the center of his own picture. The movie depicts an urban, cultural, emotional and fantastic Bucharest. It is composed of houses, buildings, parks but also of movie characters, a political and real world, of imagined-mainstream figures of today. Ion Bârlădeanu is a character in his own right: he has always dreamt of playing in the movies, of becoming a hero...The collages he creates are nothing more than his own movies, therefore he is a true director; he imagines all kind of stories. The inherent dynamics of Ion Bârlădeanu’s collages is in tune with the director’s rhythm of her art video, providing a well-planned surprise. There is no contrast between the two visual approaches, on the contrary, they make the most of each other.
2013
A Brief History of Astra Film
animated documentary for Astra Film Festival
Sibiu
Real, possible, and imaginary lives or somewhere between documentary and fiction. The anniversary film A Short History of Astra Film, a story about people and cinema, winner at the Gopo Awards. The film called A Brief History of Astra Film is an extraordinary cultural project that marks a twenty years history of the first Romanian international documentary film festival, Astra Film Festival. The film reveals how on the first edition of the festival, to be sponsored meant to practically beg, thus to be humiliated, as back then this was a foreign concept in cultural management. Therefore, for the first edition, international volunteers were acquired. Even if people, mentalities, communication mediums, and the manner in which information is disseminated are all exposed to radical change in our age, opposed to the situation of these in 1993, what stays the same all these years of Astra Film Festival is the genuine pleasure of meeting the other inside the projection room and outside it.
2013
Maria Sinesti
"There are moments in my life which, when I remember them, a chill shakes my head to my feet. These mistakes in my life ... how useless misery ..." (Maria Sinesti - Jocul Ielelor de Camil Petrescu)
2013
The Seagull
Set in the Russian countryside, the cast of characters comes together desiring more than what they have. Some want love, some money, some a place in the world.
2011
I will never walk alone
with Iulia Burtea
Sometimes reality is not enough. We allow ourselves to be lived by ghosts, by cravings, by lies, by fashion, shortcomings, aesthetics, fairytales, love stories, horror movies… and we do not know anymore if the ones beside us are our own brand of fiction or reality. What is important is to never again be alone.