Sandpit #186

A glimpse at the daily lives of patients in a Romanian psychiatric hospital.

Oxygen is a free re-enactment of a real case: a man who tried to cross the Danube illegally using an oxygen cylinder, to escape the communist Romania.

Together, a filmmaker and her characters venture into a personal research project about intimacy. On the fluid border between reality and fiction, Touch Me Not follows the emotional journeys of Laura, Tómas and Christian, offering a deeply empathic insight into their lives. Craving for intimacy yet also deeply afraid of it, they work to overcome old patterns, defense mechanisms and taboos, to cut the cord and finally be free. Touch Me Not looks at how we can find intimacy in the most unexpected ways, at how to love another without losing ourselves.

The Resocializing Center at the Neuropsychiatry Hospital 'Alexandru Obregia' is a more or less Utopian attempt to reinstate the mentally ill back into the 'system', into society. Beyond the succes or the failure of this attempt, the emotional memory keeps the inner poetry of some personal worlds - as a way to survive in a chaotic and absurd reality - and, in the end, the relativity of the 'normality' concept.

The story of Marin Pintea (now 82), former model at the Bucharest Art Academy – a story of a very particular conception about art and about one’s own existence. Beyond this, a film about the failed ‘immortality’ attempts of each of us, about time and death