We dedicate this week’s premiere to a key piece of our catalog. One of the films that was a cornerstone of this passion project, created and kept alive independently, namely “The Phantom Father” by Lucian Georgescu, the feature film debut of the screenwriter, professor and founder of CINEPUB – the only free vod platform dedicated to art and independent cinema in Romania.

“The Phantom Father” has woven in it’s fabric plenty of richness. Starting from the initial story idea by Barry Gifford, “the only american novelist touched by genius” (Norman Mailer), and the author of “Wild at Heart”, adapted to screen by David Lynch in 1990; to the impressive cast composed of some of the biggest names in the Romanian theatre and cinema such as Marcel Iureș, Victor Rebengiuc, Mihaela Sârbu, Mimi Brănescu or Mariana Mihuț; and the unseen aura of the late Ovidiu Bose Paștina, who was meant to direct the film before his untimely death in 2006.

A film that has spent a good part of its life here with us, on Cinepub, and that is soon due to leave. Two seemingly unconnected stories unfold before our eyes: a stranger seeks to find his roots in a “rhapsodic Romania” (Pacific Film Archive), and an old projectionist is banished from his cinema, because it’s being demolished and a shopping mall is built instead. At times a kind of “Cinema Paradiso” post coming-of-age, other times, a “Stranger than Paradise” at the midlife crisis, “The Phantom Father” gathered under its belt a monumental history, which can be rendered best by its author who prepared for this occasion a sincere text about what it means to make cinema.

“Ten years ago I was finishing, after an exhausting journey, a small film with a strange name. The Phantom Father was a tiresome project. The embryo moved early one summer at TIFF when I met Gifford. My dynamic with Barry was, over the years, that of a passionate, love and hate relationship. Both taken to the extreme. I loved spending time together with him, moments of surreal poetry, but I felt different when we parted to return to the real world. That’s one of the reasons for which The Phantom Father didn’t turn out to be the story that the two parents – codenames Stein and Balkanski – wished for.

The divorce followed, and the poor phantom haunted for years in the shape of an orphan synopsis, and then as an immature first draft searching for a foster family. Finally, when the financing was timidly taking shape, the director associated with the project, Ovidiu Bose Paștina, left us to document eternity. The earthy duties remained and I was compelled to begin production abruptly and without being at peace with myself; the confusion contaminated the uncertain theme of the film, and its lost protagonist. Halfway through shooting, I was diagnosed with a serious illness, which demanded a complicated, and risky surgery. We halted production and was able to return only two years after – there was no more coherent continuity regarding the main characters – therefore, I took a series of choices regarding the script and directorial approach which gave the general tone of the film: improvisation. If there is one moment which I remember fondly, is the make up with Barry, who has a special cameo in the film. “Buddy, take the gun out of your head. It’s just a movie, man!” – Stein told me – and it sounded like a line from the Lost Highway.

The execution mistakes were followed by marketing ones: despite the traditional custom, I decided that the premiere would take place in the country of origin, at the festival that took the film under its wing. It was it’s coup de grace: TIFF is the place where Romanian films must return, and under no circumstance become. The film was thrown in a cinema, with me frozen in the electric chair, and Barry Gifford haunting the streets of Cluj, alone, without any kind of official attention on the part of the organizers, not even from those who paid for his ticket, the Romanian Cultural Institute from New York… The author of Sailor and Lula, City of Ghosts, Lost Highway, or Hotel Room Trilogy, was just a name on the TIFF line-up. And he had nonetheless made the mistake of signing a Romanian film, cursed by the local critics; a strange and imperfect kind of film, beyond any recently established cannon. Jay Weissberg, correspondent of Variety in Cluj couldn’t have done more against the local opinion, he was the only one who found a positive remark: Mihaela Sârbu – an outstanding debut. However, the critics around the roundtable, at the end of the festival, had already made up their minds: the film was a failure – although more than half of them had not even seen it. A few reactions from them, such as the discussions moderated by the well meaning colleagues from the Association of the Romanian Film Critics, were enough to cancel the film’s right to live, The grave was the only option.

Despite all of the above, the phantom came to life. There were festivals and audiences which welcomed, liked, nominated and even awarded the film. I am – there is no other way – this film’s most ferocious critic. But the extreme and extremist reception of The Phantom Father continues to surprise me. For better or worse, loved or hated, the film does not leave its spectators indifferent, and this is perhaps one of its few, but essential qualities.

“Lucian Georgescu and his family should die of Ebola!”

Wrote one of the spectators on Cinepub’s YouTube channel – and someone told me they might be a voice of the “new criticism” – might be, but what do they have against my family? Not to complain, but the only biological culprits (a.k.a. the author’s parents) have been phantoms for a while now… The best Romanian film I’ve seen – said VICE US. I have no idea how many Romanian films had Rocco Castoro seen beforehand, but I was skeptical…”I want to thank you for this wonderful and emotional film” told me a lady coming out of the cinema hall – a refined cinephile. I was petrified. I didn’t know if I should instantly die of Ebola, or to cry, holding the lady in my arms, because I had brought emotion to the screen. Love and hate. Heaven and Hell, Exile and the Kingdom. The manic-depressive treatment was furthermore applied to the film, this time online. I created Cinepub not to show a film, but films: loved or hated, awarded or marginalized, big and small, well done or imperfect, all of them kept in a drawer, in archives or on shelves, in distribution agreements and sales charts. We make films to show them, and if we are loved and hated, it means we are alive.

“The good and the bad, the old and the young…meaning all of them…all the films…” This is how alleskino.de’s slogan sounds in my open translation from German. Alleskino is a VOD platform, founded by of the Phantom’s guardian angel, the legendary producer Joachim von Vietinghoff, who helped take the film to an end – not necessarily a happy one. Joachim inspired me. And because the platform had to have a name, I called it cinepub.ro. And because it’s .ro and not .de, it had to be F(VOD)…F is for free. Such as love and hate.

In two months we will celebrate 10 years from The Phantom Father’s premiere. And also in two months, it will leave cinepub.ro and end up in a dusty box, on the shelf of an archive. Cinepub will try to resist and live, as much as it can, in this world in which today hatred seems stronger than love.

Cinepub thanks it’s “founder” and says goodbye:
Farewell, Phantom Father!”

Lucian Georgescu,
on the day of war and Dragobete* – 24.02.2022
*Romanian love celebration day