Valuri

At the seaside, on the beach, two people experience extreme situations. A beautiful Western mother asks a gypsy boy to look after her 4 year old baby; a husband and father fights ennui by flirting with the same beautiful foreigner while teaching her how to swim. But the story takes a different course when the beautiful mother disappears in the waves and the gypsy boy realises that something happened of which he can take advantage, as he’s really interested in the vanished lady’s video camera and bag, now left on the beach. The story portrays a moralistic family focussed on other people’s “indecent” behaviour and unable to observe their own, a family that maps out the hardly traceable thin red line between good and evil, without quite becoming a negative hero. The gypsy boy, on the other hand, acts on his own interests, that is, stealing, but the way he does it reveals a superior kind of humanity, disinterested and in obvious opposition to the family’s. This a story about the Romanian society, which enforces certain stereotypes about minorities that act according to those stereotypes – most probably, our fault, too… With neither moralising intentions, nor “good and bad guys”, the story simply displays a range of characters normally present in our life, including commonplace reactions that are hard to condemn or reprove. The script’s only conclusion is a happy one: any cross-cultural interaction is beneficial, after all - at least culturally, if not socially.