The next day I plan to see a film but by the time I surface I’m hungry so instead go to the local festival restaurant where I have vouchers for a couple of meals. I bump into Rik who accompanies me. We walk down the various backstreets of Cluj before hitting upon the pedestrian-only quietude of a modern but beautifully paved walkway with savoury kitchen flavours wafting through the air; at the far end of the walkway is our restaurant, essentially a covered but open-aired patio. We’re given a menu but when I show our waitress the vouchers she takes one of them along with the menu and I wait in blissful but ignorant anticipation as Rik, without voucher, orders something to do with mushrooms.
Our drinks come and I’m given a spoon – nice; three course meal I think. Next some soup arrives with bread; a warm hotchpotch stew mainly with beans, it is hearty and I finish it easily. Rik and I carry on talking and drinking. My next course arrives; raspberry-ripple ice cream – I love raspberry-ripple and tuck in! I’ve recently been to Gordon Ramsay at Claridges for the first time in my life so I don’t think of this as anything other than an amuse bouche. But then a couple of mouthfuls later it starts to sink in that I’m not eating just off Bond Street, I’m eating in Romania and there aren’t two mouthfuls but in fact four generous scoops. Of raspberry-ripple. I ask Rik whether it’s normal for Romanian diners to follow soup with ice cream and he says he doesn’t think so. He asks our waitress and she contradicts him. I tell Rik not to worry and he asks me how it is – it’s good, I say, I love raspberry-ripple! He offers me some of the cheese on toast that accompanies his mushroom soup and I gratefully accept.
Amongst all the fun of the fair, it’s easy to forget that I’ve actually come to town to promote Red White & Blue. Usually I’ll do a short introductory talk and return at the end of the film to do a question and answer session. This screening is different, however, since I have to whizz off to see the ten or so short films that I’m on the jury for. My black, sleek Merc pulls up and I’m whisked away to a multiplex on the edge of town. On the way the driver gets a call which he hands over to me. There’s a panicked lady on the end of the line asking if there’s anything special about the tape we provided the festival with – yeah, it’s got my film on it! I’m told it isn’t working; ah, I see – no, in that case, nothing special about the tape! I assure the woman I’ll be there in ten minutes and will help sort the problem out and although this seems to reassure her, it is complete baloney since I’m technically as retarded as they come. Hmmm.
As luck would have it, by the time I arrive, the cinema has decided that the tape is fine but it is the player that’s wrong; they’ve changed the player and everything now works fine and dandy. I give a longer introduction than usual and I’m then whisked back through the shopping centre, to my chauffeur-driven limo in which we do some more whizzing back to another cinema in the centre of town where I’m introduced to the sold-out crowd along with my fellow jury members. I wave gallantly, take my seat and settle into what is an impressive show of shorts of which I’ve seen a couple but not the majority.
Time flies when you’re having fun and as we head to the next party, we the jury sit and discuss in earnest which film should win. We each name our top three shorts and although we each have different favourites, there’s only one film which is in our top three. It’s a Spanish film called Les Bessones del Carrer de Ponen and is a stop-motion animation film about a young boy who is kidnapped and ends up living with a couple of crazy old spinsters. Based on a true story, at 13 minutes in length, it took something like five months for the pre-production, six months to shoot and one imagines another four months or so to edit and sound mix. For presenting a sympathetic character (which is pretty tough when you’re making a stop-motion project) in a very detailed world, we all agreed this was the one; life made easy.
The jury collectively continues to discuss the films whilst eating more and drinking more and although I’ve made arrangements to see a friend who I met in Cluj last time who’s going to a gypsy party at Diesel (where else!?), I don’t leave until about 2.30 in the morning. Fellow film-maker Nowt joins me whilst everyone else opts for their beds.
It has to be said that Romanian women are stunning. Obviously not all of them but if you’d come to the gypsy party you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was a model party. All the girls are traditionally dressed with slits up their skirts, mid-riffs a plenty, flowers in their hair and large hoop earrings dangling from their little ears. All the guys wear dark jeans, leather waistcoats and cowboy type hats. There are a couple of live bands playing with everyone dancing on tables, hand-clapping and of course drinking; a crazy hedonistic atmosphere to say the least.
The friend I was meeting is a girl called Alexandra (not her real name) who had come to see The Living and the Dead and had related to it since her father had died when she was 15 and none of her family members had told her about it for a fair few days; my film was about love, loss and family and we struck up a platonic friendship during my short visit, remaining in touch for six months or so. What the hell! I’ll shoot her an email and if she’s around we can hook up and she can see my next film. Oh yeah, did I say she looks exactly like Nastassja Kinski!?
Anyway, I leave Nowt gawking at the entrance and wander Diesel, wondering if my visual memory will serve me well and as it happens, yes it does! I spot Alexandra on the bottom floor of the club. We hug and kiss hello and she introduces me to her boyfriend who it turns out is Israeli. I buy myself a drink (they’re not drinking because they’ve already had too much but look remarkably sober to me), sit down and we chat some more. At some point Alexandra excuses herself and I’m left with the boyfriend and I’m slightly taken aback by one of his questions: “You like to party with guys?” Hedging my bets here, I reply that I like to party, sure. “But you like to party with guys?” I tell him I prefer to party with girls. He takes my hand and asks me to follow.
Maybe my writer’s imagination takes flight here but I’m thinking of a Romanian revenge movie where a jealous boyfriend gets his own back on his girlfriend’s ex-lover by introducing him to all his gorilla gay friends and them having their wicked ways with him. Obviously this has nothing to do with me since my relationship with said girl has only been platonic but some guys do get awfully upset about not much and there’s also the classic Hitchcockian device of mistaken identity to throw into the mix. Hmmm. Not wanting to appear rude, I follow the boyfriend, albeit warily and on the dance floor he introduces me to one of his Israeli friends who’s wearing a porkpie hat and has his arm in a sling. Admittedly he doesn’t look too dangerous but that’s never stopped your average serial killer and there’s always rohypnol lurking in every clammy hand and free drink. We chat for a while and no-one offers me a free drink (which I suppose is good from a survivalist point of view).
