Tata
(Romania/Germany/Netherlands, 82 mins.)
Dir. Lina Vdovîi, Radu Ciorniciuc
Programme: TIFF Docs (World premiere)
Journalist Lina Vdovîi has not spoken to her estranged father, Pavel, in 25 years since he left their homeland of Moldova to find work in Italy. Haunted by years of physical and emotional abuse suffered at his hand, Vdovîi makes it clear early in the riveting documentary Tata that “to live without fear [she] cut ties with [her] father.”
Unfortunately, for the reporter-turned-filmmaker, familial chains are often tougher to break than one would expect. This is especially true when she receives a video message from her father pleading her help. Displaying bruises on his arm, Pavel discloses that he is being abused by his employer.
The revelation places Vdovîi in a rather sticky predicament. On one hand, she has spent most of her journalistic career exposing the abuses and injustices that immigrants endure at the hands of their exploitative employers. However, the person who is now in desperate need of her expertise is the same man that inflicted years of torment on her family.
Staying true to her investigative journalist training, Vdovîi travels to Italy, accompanied by her real-life partner and co-director Radu Ciorniciuc (Acasa, My Home, which Vdovîi wrote), to help her father accumulate proof to back up his claims. However, it does not take long for her unresolved traumas to resurface in her father’s presence. In attempting to navigate her sense of duty and her conflicted raw emotions, Vdovîi’s Tata, which means “father” in Romanian, evolves into a fascinating portrait of the generational traumas that often complicate the road towards healing.
A gripping work on multiple levels, the film is both an engaging exposé on the ways immigrants are exploited for cheap labour and a harrowing exploration into a culture where toxic masculinity is deeply rooted in the soil. Regarding the former, Vdovîi and Ciorniciuc hit all the journalistic beats one would expect. Equipping Pavel with hidden cameras, their efforts let audiences see firsthand the physical and emotional abuses that Pavel endures. They also capture evidence of predatory acts, such as underpaying migrants, in which those in power pedal.
It is when Vdovîi becomes introspective, trying to understand the root of the abuse she endured and the potential impact on the future, as she is pregnant at the time of filming, that Tata is most compelling. In capturing her father’s plight abroad, she weaves a stunning contrast between Pavel’s vulnerability in Italy and aggression he obliviously exudes in Moldova.
As if flipping a switch, one that conveniently blacks out any sense of responsibility, Pavel’s reversion to his old ways when in his homeland speaks to how deep the generational well of toxicity is. His inability to atone for his past sins, or even see the parallels between his experience with his boss and his actions with his family, is less startling the more one understands life in Moldova.
Painting a vibrant portrait of a place where men are raised to view emotions as weakness and overcompensate by wearing a performative suit of masculinity that rarely fits them, Vdovîi and Ciorniciuc capture a landscape suffocating from the thick odour of machismo.
While Pavel and other men view violence as a way to keep the household in order, just as their parents raised them to do, the women of the region are clearly hanging on by a thread. Either staying for the sake of the kids or lacking the financial means to secure their own places, their inability to break free has reverberations that span generations. What makes this situation even more disturbing is how complacence and forgiveness are often confused by individuals like Vdovîi’s father.
If Pavel assumes that forgiveness is something that can be demanded without accountability, and not earned over time, the documentary captures how such logic only keeps the wheels of abuse spinning. In exploring the volatile thorns on her family tree, Vdovîi presents a richly layered work that ponders the legacy of violence and the things that are often inherited without question.
A compelling and powerful work, Tata shows why you sometimes need to sever the ties that bind.
