With Milk Teeth, presented in the Orizzonti section of Venice 82, Romanian director Mihai Mincan returns to the Lido after his debut feature Spre nord (2022). Set in the twilight years of Ceaușescu’s regime, the film follows a young girl witnessing the mysterious disappearance of her older sister, turning memory and trauma into a touching vision of the transition from communism to the fragile hope of a new future.
The story comes from a dream of a little girl with her ear pressed against a concrete wall. How did you transform this dream into a story for the film?
It wasn’t really a dream, but rather an image I had after reading about a child who went missing in 1989. That was one of the starting points, but the film had many others: a police dossier, a series of memories, including my own from that period. On one level, the image recalls my own childhood: my best friend and I lived in adjacent apartments in a concrete block in Bucharest, and we used to communicate through the wall with our own little code. On another level, the image carries a metaphorical weight. I knew I wanted to write a film about a lonely child – one who longs to communicate, to understand, but who is met only with silence from the world around her. From there, every small detail slowly began to fall into place until the script finally took shape.
The film conveys a very particular sense of silence and confinement. How did you work with sound, image, and performance to create this world?
We wanted to recreate the world of my childhood: a world of very soft sounds, of a silence that was frightening, shaped by an oppressive system, by a society where people could not speak openly. With little access to information or understanding, a child’s world tends to shrink, becoming almost like a box they are forced to live in. To reflect this, I relied on the oppressive silence of the soundscape as well as on a visual language of constriction – blocking, claustrophobic spaces. The girl’s performance also embodies this stillness. From the start, I knew the actress had to convey a natural immobility. Most of the things you see in the film comes from what she perceives through walls: distant voices and bits of words she tries to piece together, resulting in a fragmented reality.
In the twilight of Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania, eight-year-old Maria is the sole witness to the mysterious disappearance of her older sister. While the adults retreat into silence, it is she who sets out in search of the truth, guided by the strength of friendship and the...
What led you to adopt a child’s perspective to portray that historical moment?
I’ve seen countless films about adults facing their struggles, but there is something pure, naive, and helpless in the way a child perceives the world. When the revolution happened, I recall my parents, joyful, kissing and saying, “A new life is about to begin!” All the adults around me shared that sense that something momentous was happening. But within six months it became clear that nothing would really change. In many ways, what followed was worse than communism. The first ten years of Romanian democracy were marked by poverty and despair; it often felt like the end of the world. That’s why I chose the child’s perspective – it seemed the truest way to capture that period, a world that had somehow gone wrong.
How did you find and work with the young actress who plays the main character?
I saw many children for the main role; it took a long time. I cast Emma, not only for the way she looked in the camera or moved, but because she was emotionally there. I was looking for a child who could understand loneliness, and what it means to face death – the loss of someone dear you’ll never see again. Emma knew those feelings. From the beginning, our conversations went far beyond what you’d expect from a child. It wasn’t about flowers or dresses, but about crying, feeling lonely, unheard, or helpless. She felt right from the start. Working with her was incredibly easy. She’s smart, intuitive, and all she needed were simple directions. I gave her freedom within the scene, let the camera follow her, and allowed the other actors to react to her. It was one of the best working experiences I’ve ever had.
The film conveys a very specific atmosphere of Romania in the late ’80s and early ’90s. How did you work with locations and production design to capture that world?
That was a bit complicated. Romania today can be summed up in one word: chaos. It’s a very chaotic country, lacking any kind of consequential logic. After the ’90s, Romania looked like a Dadaist landscape – Bucharest like a Dadaist city. You had massive apartment blocks next to corporate buildings, next to beautiful old houses. The result was almost schizophrenic. Finding locations that reflected the mood of those years was difficult. We eventually found them about 400 km from Bucharest, in poorer, post-industrial provinces. One town, once dependent on mining, had fallen into cruel poverty after the mines closed, and its exteriors matched what we were looking for. From there, we worked carefully on the interiors, reconstructing that world as best we could. But we never wanted to make a documentary, nor a film “about” communism. Rather, communism – or, more accurately, socialism – is present as an invisible force in the background, something you feel throughout the film. It’s never explicit, but it floats, always there. We worked hard to capture that atmosphere, and in the end, I think we did.
