Larisa Crunțeanu

"I do not care if we go down in history as barbarians." These words, spoken in the Council of Ministers of the summer of 1941, started the ethnic cleansing on the Eastern Front. The film attempts to comment on this statement.

A film composed entirely of archival photographs and documents related to the Iași Pogrom of June 1941. The first part of the film consists of photographs of the victims, accompanied by statements and testimonies about their fate. The second part, shorter, is a montage of photos of the pogrom itself.

During the summer of 1937, Emanuel, a young man in his early twenties, is committed to a sanatorium on the Black Sea coast for treatment of his bone tuberculosis. The treatment consists of painful spine punctures that confine him to a plaster on a stretcher-bed. Little by little, as Emanuel gets accustomed to the sadness of his new life, he discovers that inside the sanatorium there is still a life to be lived to the fullest.

A Dying Leaf Should Be Able to Carry the Weight of the World is a visit to the botanical garden and museum in Cluj-Napoca, a journey through time and space, a discovery of plants with unknown stories, of plants that don’t exist anymore, of plants that can tell us as much about the past as they can about the future. Fossils, herbs and botanical illustrations are witnesses of the past, proof of evolution and change, but also prophets of what is yet to come.

A self-reflecting collage made up of the director’s thoughts and moods while relocating to an alien, poetic Zurich.

A self-reflecting collage made up of the director’s thoughts and moods while relocating to an alien, poetic Zurich.