Cabbage, Potatoes and Other Demons
Director: Serban Georgescu
Language: romanian
Year: 2016
Duration: 60
Country: Romania
A tragicomedy of a Romanian village exploiting the practice of agriculture in the village of Lunguletu, where the farmers at the end of the day have to decide they either sell for nothing or destroy their crops. When film-maker Serban Georgescu buys a ton of cabbage for only 20 Euros, he sets out to explore the absurdist dynamic of Romanian agriculture in the Lunguletu village. There, some 1,000 small farmers, who own about the same number of tractors, produce approximately 100,000 tons of cabbage and potatoes per year an overproduction which never gets to sell. When they end up in the local market surrounded by pyramids of their produce, the farmers underbid each other until they end up losing money.
Georgescu’s adventure, with Moran Spurlock’s Super Size Me overtones, takes him to Lunguleţu for a year, where he starts cultivating cabbage and potatoes in an attempt to understand why the farmers voluntarily enter this economic dead end. Drawing creatively on archive and contemporary footage, Georgescu connects between the current conundrum and the farmers past experiences at the time of Romanians communist regime, when the trauma of forced collectivization has led to a residual suspicion of any kind of cooperative in the present.
Director bio: Șerban Georgescu Studied at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Bucharest (1991-2000). In the second year of studying, he started working as an image editor at Canal 31, a modest television by Adrian Sarbu. An important moment for him was the meeting with Ovidiu Bose Paština in 1995, when together they made fashion presentations for Janine (Adrian Sarbu’s wife). He works for MediaPro creating videos and commercials. In 1998, he founded his own company, Kolectiv Film, which collaborates with advertising agencies. In 2003, he filmed „Everest” a documentary film about the group of Romanians in the expedition. Since 2006 he has been collaborating constantly with Norwegian film director David Kinsella.