A bunch of young people, more or less hippies, waste time at the cinema with a dull film. On-screen, a man lies on the railway and awaits his end. But at some point the screen and reality become the same.
Regardless of how unspectacular the scene from To Be may seem to others — even outdated for the 80s –, the Romanian spectator will feel its improbability from the very first moment: that cool insolence of young people, that waste of time, that New York bohemian music, that cigarette too similar to a joint, nothing looks like how the youth used to be represented in the last decade of the Ceaușescu regime (all the more provocative as Florian Pittiș, then the bad boy of the Romanian theater, appears as protagonist). But To Be is not only a generational spectacle but also a special film about cinema and its indifferent gaze — watching the death of a man on the big screen, then watching at the same time the indifference of other spectators, Pittiș’s protagonist takes the place of the man on-screen who is awaiting death, only to find himself being watched indifferently by a horse-champ film crew. The short film is, in fact, a montage of rushes from a feature film that was not approved by the university committee and also poorly developed. (Călin Boto)
Petros Minopetros was born in Piraeus in 1956. He studied film directing at the University of Bucharest, in the Department of Film Direction of the Caragiale University of Theatrical Arts and Cinematography (now UNATC). He lived in Romania for six years (1977-82), where he directed six films. In 1983 he returned to Greece and worked with the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) as a script writer and documentary director. He created (research, script, directing) the ERT2 TV documentary series Chasing the Rainbow [Kinigoi tou Ouraniou Toxou] (1986), on the history of Greek rock music. He further worked with the International Film Festival of Thessaloniki directing documentary films and taught filmmaking and film directing for over twenty years in state and private institutions.