Acasă, My Home: Riveting Doc Follows Family Rejecting, Then Forcibly Accepting, Urban Life

By Linda Barnard

Rating A-

With Bucharest high-rises on the horizon, the grassy wetland around Lake Vacaresti — an abandoned natural reservoir on the edge of the city —is a wilderness paradise life for the nine kids of the Enache family.

They trail one behind the other as they run into long days without rules, school or limitations in filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc’s Acasă, My Home, an intimate, four-year look at what defines home and family.

They fish with their hands from repurposed pool toys and makeshift rods. There’s plenty of roughhousing, often broken up by swimming or some important kid discovery. Their family bonds are their strength and comfort.

They eventually return to a dirt yard busy with cats, dogs, and chickens. The makeshift shack in the middle, its roof made of old rugs, is where they all sleep together in a heap with father Gică, mother Niculina.

They may be illiterate and unschooled, but they’re wise to the world and know to scram into the tall grass when a social services worker shows up, even if the woman is sympathetic.

Father Gică, a former chemistry lab assistant who moved to the delta in rejecting the “wicked civilization” of the city 18 years before, sees his accomplishment in the size of his family. The kids, who know no other life, seem content. They’re neglected and look undernourished. A couple have rattling coughs.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

Eldest son, teenage Vali, is the first to push back. He’s not happy about being sent out at night fishing on his father’s say-so, later climbing a sloping concrete embankment to head to the city to sell the catch door-to-door.

When the area is rezoned as an urban park, soon to be the largest in Europe, time runs out for Gică’s version of utopia. He tries to reason with officials, offers to act as a guide, then threatens to set himself on fire. It’s a battle he can’t win. Prince Charles shows up to plant a tree, pretty much symbolically sealing the deal. The family is relocated to a small apartment in the city, the shack demolished to make way for a new visitors’ centre.

Urban life is initially thrilling in some ways. Ciorniciuc sticks close to astonished faces as a child has a haircut. Eyes wide, they have a first glimpse of Christmas illuminations.

The new life is also challenging, poignantly evident in a scene where one boy, at school for the first time, sits on the edges of a casual conversation in the gym and listens to classmates. He’s nervously unsure what to do, yet captivated.

Some kids are happy to stay in the city, others join their father in longing for the shack and their before lives.

There are hints of racism in the city. The family is Roma, something barely mentioned, yet evident when a noisy, joyous birthday party for one of the kids sparks the landlady’s ire. When the boys drop their lines to fish in a city park against the rules, the police slap a large fine on them to teach them a lesson.

Ciorniciuc uses close-up camerawork to let expressive faces tell the story, proof of the remarkable access he had for this film as he grew close to the family, especially considering Gică’s level of mistrust or anything related to his reviled civilization.

Despite the relationship he had with the Enaches, Ciorniciuc sticks to his roots as an investigative journalist and makes no judgements. He avoids giving easy answers.

For a viewer, it’s hard not to form opinions when Gică uses donated books intended to educate his illiterate children as fuel for the shack woodstove, sneering his kids don’t need “this shit” or when Vali, who eventually lands a job working at the new urban park, seems close to repeating his father’s mistakes.

The question of which is the superior life hangs unanswered at the end of the documentary. Is the Enache family better off in the delta, or in the city? As can be asked by so many of us, which of the places we live is destined to be remembered as home?

Acasă, My Home. Directed by Radu Ciorniciuc. With the Enache family. Now available for streaming.