‘Something Familiar’ Director on Her Very Personal Hybrid Doc About Overcoming Trauma and Giving Herself “the Gift of the Archetypal Mother”

Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Rachel Taparjan is a British Romanian filmmaker and academic in North East England , working as a senior lecturer in social work at Teesside University. In her film work, she has directed documentary shorts, but on Tuesday, March 17, she will world premiere her debut feature in the main competition of the 23rd edition of Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival , CPH:DOX . Something Familiar follows the director as she helps a woman, Mihaela, search for her birth mother in Romania by traveling to the orphanage where they were both adopted. On the journey, she gets drawn into her own family’s history and trauma and uncovers a painful legacy that hovers like a dark cloud over the women in the family. Related Stories News Fortress Hollywood: Inside the Oscars Security Machine Movies 'The Secret Reading Club of Kabul' Follows Young Afghan Women, Inspired by Anne Frank, Defying the Taliban: "They Want to Be Heard and Seen" Something Familiar intersperses the journey to Romania with scenes of the filmmaker enlisting, or casting, actresses to sit in for her mother, whom she never really knew, for conversations in chairs set up across from each other. Family bonds, absence, and trauma loom large as themes in the doc, but so does self-authorship. To be more precise, Something Familiar wonders if we can rewrite familiar narratives. Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan and Elena Martin of Manifest Film in Romania and Aleksandra Bilic of My Accomplice in the U.K. produced the film, which was co-produced by Dermot O’Dempsey in association with Shudder Films. The cinematographer was Andrei Oană, with editing courtesy of Alice Powell. Stranger Films Sales is handling sales. In an interview with THR , Taparjan shared insights into the challenges of making the ...