Adina Pintilie

Biography

At the 2018 Berlinale, Adina Pintilie accepted the Golden Bear for a film that part of the audience had received with hostility. Accepting the award, she said she had wanted to invite the viewer to a dialogue.

She was born on 12 January 1980 in Bucharest; her legal name is Adina-Elena Pintilie. She studied directing at the Ion Luca Caragiale National University of Theatre and Film in Bucharest and graduated, possibly, in 2008. Later she took part in the Berlinale Talent Campus, which admits participants by selection. Her first work as a director, the short film “Ea” (“It”), came out in 2003; she also wrote its screenplay. A string of short films followed: “Trenuri nepăzite” (“Unguarded Trains”, 2004), “Un fel de singuratate” (“A Kind of Loneliness”, 2004), “Nea Pintea… Model” (“Uncle Pintea… Model”, 2005), “Frica domnului G” (“Mr. G’s Fear”, 2006) and “Casino” (2006). Later she made “Oxygen” (2010), nominated in Romania as best short film of the year. This period is best known for the documentary “Don’t Get Me Wrong” (“Nu te supără, dar…”, 2007). It is a look at the everyday life of patients in a Romanian psychiatric hospital. The film was shown at Locarno and at the Warsaw Film Festival, and at DOK Leipzig in Leipzig it won the Golden Dove for best documentary. In 2008 it was recognised at Vukovar. Her next documentary, “Balastiera #186” (2007), won a Runner Up award at the Miami film festival and a special mention at Trieste in 2009. I would not treat these films as mere prehistory: the theme Pintilie would return to is already visible here, people on the edge of what is considered normal and the way others look at them.

Her first feature, “Touch Me Not” (“Nu mă atinge-mă”), came out in 2018. She wrote the screenplay, produced the film and appeared in it, and possibly edited it as well. A film about intimacy, the body and shame, it was made on the border between fiction and documentary, with people of differing bodily experience taking part. In the competition of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival it won the top prize and the award for best first feature. The same spring it was nominated for the European Film Award. Reactions were mixed: because of its nudity and explicit scenes, the film has been called one of the most controversial winners of the Berlinale’s Golden Bear.

Beyond cinema, Pintilie works in other formats: her long-running study of intimacy and body politics spans performance, cinema and virtual reality. She is also a co-founder of the independent production company Manekino Film in Bucharest.