Monday, February 8, 2016

Film Review: Libelula (2015) Mihai Salajan


By Olivia Maria Hărşan


There is a relentless energy in Mihai Salajan’s Libelula that interchanges between moments of light and darkness. Focusing on documenting the underlying concepts of existence and being, the film reveals to us a compilation of stills and motion images that call for a metaphysical exploration of life. Accompanied by a haunting soundtrack, Salajan’s portaits of mundanity – an old man arguing with a tradesman, a cat grazing in the grass, a woman enjoying a meal in a Chinese restaurant – these commonplace activities become sinister and nauseating. Libelula accurately documents daily life in the “cement boxes”— apartments that act as visual reminders of the communist past. The narrator merely re-captures these flashes of existence, what is now, juxtaposing them with artifacts of a bygone era, what was… then.

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