25 years after her parents’ wedding, a filmmaker discovers the VHS recording of the event. By watching and rewatching the images, she tries to discover more about her family, but eventually finds herself trapped in a world of hidden memories.
The greatest form of longing is a longing for a past when we didn’t even exist, yet which includes us by default, at least as some kind of potentialities of the future. Andreea Chiper breaks apart the footage of her parents’ wedding as if it were the chronicle of a family, looking for leads and details of personal histories contained within gestures, looks and seemingly unimportant things which have found their way into the frame just by pure instinct. The kitsch visual obsessions of wedding home movies — insistent zooms onto tables or ridiculous group dances — make room for introspection and prospection, the video camera acting like a link between generations and as a tool to plant ourselves into places and moments in time we would otherwise be unable to access. (Dora Leu)
Andreea Chiper studies documentary filmmaking at the National Film and Theatre University in Bucharest (UNATC) and occasionally works as a film critic. She is deputy editor of the student magazine Film Menu and moderator within the magazine’s affiliated film club. She was part of the One World Romania International Documentary and Human Rights Film Festival team for several years. She increasingly believes that documentaries will save the world someday. Dancing at My Parents’ Wedding is her first film.