Teeth

Romanian filmmaker Mihai Mincan is back at the Venice Film Festival‘s Horizons competition with “Milk Teeth,” a deeply personal drama set during the final days of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship.

The film marks Mincan’s second Venice selection after his 2022 debut feature “To the North.” It will next play at the Toronto International Film Festival. Variety is exclusively debuting the film’s trailer.

Set in Romania in 1989, “Milk Teeth” follows 10-year-old Maria as she becomes the last witness to her sister’s mysterious disappearance in a small, isolated town. The story explores how a child processes trauma and loss against the backdrop of a collapsing political system.

For Mincan, the project represents both a departure from and continuation of his cinematic journey. “I wanted this really free approach,” the director tells Variety, describing how he abandoned his meticulously planned shooting style from “To the North.” “We had a list of shots, but we basically gave it up pretty soon after a few days of shooting.”

The shift in approach was partly practical and partly philosophical. Working with child actors, Mincan knew he “didn’t want to rehearse with that child a lot.” Instead, he wanted “the girl would have, like, a lot of freedom to act and to move the way she wanted, and the camera must follow her, not the other way around.”

The story draws heavily from Mincan’s own childhood experiences. “I was the same age as… I mean, I was nine, she’s 10, actually in the film. So I know that world. I know I know the way it looked, I know the way it smelled, I know how it sounded,” he says. The film was also inspired by a police dossier about a missing girl from 1989, though Mincan discarded most elements except for one haunting image: “a girl disappearing with a bucket going to the garbage.”

That image resonates personally. “It’s such a familiar image to myself. My parents used to send me the same way, you know, with the bucket through the blocks of flats down to the garbage.”

But the film’s deeper inspiration comes from Mincan’s own daughter, who “had two or three years in which she found it really difficult to connect with the world.” This personal experience led him to create “a story of a girl who is like living in a box all the time. So the world is always out there in the background, but the connection of her with that world is very difficult at times.”

The narrative approach deliberately maintains a child’s perspective throughout, creating what Mincan calls “a fragmented narrative.” He explains: “If you go into a child’s perspective, you stay there. And that means, creatively, it’s almost shocking, because it basically needs it means that all the narrative process kind of becomes very fragmented.”

The film, featuring Emma Ioana Mogos, Marina Palii, Igor Babiac, and Istvan Teglas, is structured in two distinct parts. The first half follows the immediate aftermath of the disappearance, while the second “would be like going down inside the mind, completely inside the mind of a child.” Mincan notes this latter section is “the part that I’m most proud of in the film.”

Despite the perid setting, Mincan believes the themes remain relevant. “Romania hasn’t changed a lot since that time,” he observes. “There’s one thing in the film and also in real life today that hasn’t changed is the silence of the system… This country was built wrong.”

When editing began, Mincan and his editor worked under a simple but powerful directive written on a large piece of paper: “This is a film about loneliness.”

The production itself was an international collaboration, involving partners from Romania, France, Denmark, Greece, and Bulgaria. “Milk Teeth” is produced by deFilm (Romania), in coproduction with Remora Films (France), Ström Pictures (Denmark), StudioBauhaus (Greece), and Screening Emotions (Bulgaria). The project participated in TorinoFilmLab 2023, where it received both a Production Award and Green Filming Award.

Cercamon is handling world sales on “Milk Teeth.”

Watch the trailer here: