"I didn't make a political film. I've made a film about love. The love of "the other."
Lavinia Simina (Memento Amare)

“Memento Amare,” tells the story of an East European man working as a construction worker in London UK. The story follows his daily life and his solitary existence divided between the construction site and his tiny rented room. I wanted to question the societal view on the life of immigrants and how much do we know about them and try to represent it through a visual storytelling language.

What interested me more in this story, was the psychology of the ordinary individual in an extraordinary situation (separated from his family, friends, and profession, Mihai is being forced to embrace an entirely new identity, culture, and job with a profound lack of any nurturing personal and social life). It’s been almost 25 years since the family institution is falling apart in Eastern Europe due to separations between parents that are leaving to work abroad and children, so I thought it was the right moment to revisit this subject and write a story based on this subject and to investigate this sort of material.The story advances in a contrasting lineage. In the beginning, you have an objective representation of this character, you see only at the surface and think that he doesn’t deserve better, but as we move deeper into the story we get a more subjective perspective from the leading character’s point of view, and it’s impossible not to root for him.

My journey into filmmaking was organic. I come from a classical music combined later with a theatrical background. I’ve performed, wrote, and directed. But it all came together while I was doing my masters in Performance Making at Goldsmiths University in London. I was utterly hooked on putting together different acts only through manipulating the sound, image and sometimes short bits of poetry. It was like recreating my own Tarkovskian film scenographic setting. And then I realized what my next natural step was. Filmmaking.
What I’m trying to come across when I choose to tell a story is that part that lives in all of us, in the collective subconscious mind but is never seen. My interest is to discover organically what image and sound speak to me, about the story and the character. Sometimes I hear a song, and I get a sense of getting closer to the character, a feeling that I start to know them better.

I’m looking for the other, the outcast in all the stories that I’m trying to tell. There’s something daunting in finding that piece that exists in all of us and making peace with it on the big screen.
I wanted to tell a story about an existence that is unfamiliar to me, to unearth the possibility of another parallel existence. I see Mihai living in all of us, struggling to stay alive emotionally, to keep his innocence intact, in a world that is deadened by cynicism and routine.

I firmly believe in having multiple perspectives in the story you’re
portraying because it’s realistic. It’s life. You always have two sides of the story, and remaining rigid, trying “to educate” the audience in your point of view doesn’t serve anyone. And so I wanted the audience to believe the lives of immigrant workers were authentic and real and that’s why you don’t feel like much for him in the beginning only to give him credit as the story advances, and his humanity revealed.

As a personal preference, I like to exploit the story that I’m telling
through visual image instead of dialogue, it’s something that I’ve learned to be more powerful from my early stages as an actor, so that’s why there’s not a lot of dialogue, especially in the beginning.
I wanted the audience to make up their mind about what happens in the story with just a little guidance along the narrative. Having the audience question their knowledge about this topic and how the society is viewing and treating immigrant workers post-Brexit is what I’m trying to achieve with this film.

The theme is universal. All stories of the exile contain the same meaning, but each is surrounded by different motifs, reflecting the cultural background of the story as well as the poetry of the individual teller. My fascination with the state of seclusion in which one can withdraw, due to the different reasons at one point in one's life, started early. I was always interested in “the other,” the outcast, the one that was different than me, the one that saw things differently and from whom I could learn to be more.

There are people capable of incredible sacrifices or transformations in the name of an idea or for the love of someone. I was always interested in that, the incredible change of an ordinary person. And I kept seeing this big window and this person waiting in front of it, waiting for someone to come back or just dreaming away to a place that was home.
His ultimate test is all our test. He must forgive and stay true to his ideals or die in denial of what he truly was. I wanted to research the state of total seclusion, the postponing of living which sometimes happens when families are separated, and one becomes an immigrant. And that’s why I’ve made Memento Amare.

Memento Amare takes us from a fairytale land, where love is not only enough but also everything there is, to a physical land where love is nonexistent, and the political background is trying to divide people even more through the fear of “the other.”

There are two kinds of love that MEMENTO AMARE (remember to love) is talking about: personal love, and the love of the other (in this case “the immigrant”). The legend that Mihai is telling to his daughter Mara shows how vital it is to always choose love in life where the next moment might not exist.