ERION
written and directed by
MARIUS GABRIEL STANCU
RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
SHORTS PROGRAMME
JUNE 18-27
LONDON
WORLD PREMIERE
SCREENINGS
Thu, Jun 19th, 6:15 PM @ Vue Piccadilly – Screen 5
Sun, Jun 22nd, 1:45 PM @ Vue Piccadilly – Screen 4
Early 2000’s. Christian is a university student who is preparing his dissertation, while spending his holidays in the South of Italy. Here, he meets Erion, an Albanian origins boy, and the two begin dating secretly. Summer is passing fast and carefree; however, during an excursion in a nature reserve a few kilometers far from crowded beaches and chaos, Erion finally finds the courage to reveal Christian something unexpected.
Erion is not just a love story. I have always questioned what is the limit between personal freedom and social and cultural conventions; between what we are and what we somehow belong to and what we believe in: a question that perhaps will never be answered, or at least not in an absolute and valid way. From here, however, and also from personal experiences, my investigation and my questions about feelings start. I was born in a small town close to the Capital and I stayed there until I was 17 years old. I grew up surrounded by different types of people and backgrounds. With my teenage eyes, that was a beautiful but strange place, and only after some time I did realise all the contradictions and the sense of marginalisation it contained. The aspect that undoubtedly struck me most was linked to the life of minority communities: families who lived with their own rules and “traditions” in the neighbouring areas of our small town and in a totally different way compared to “our” lives, to they way people lived in the Capital. In those contexts that I felt so distant from me, but which I looked at with a lot of curiosity, children wereborn with a sealed fate; a destiny made of arranged marriages and, in the case of girls, of abandonment into the hands of other families already atthe age of ten or twelve. Girls and boys soon found themselves next to other people they didn’t know, without any right to be able to decide,without being able to make choices of any kind, including those concerning gender and sexuality and, of course, love. In hearing these stories told,if I myself felt anger and frustration, I didn’t imagine and I wondered what their feelings were. Erion tries to tell all of this too.
Marius Gabriel Stancu
EDITING Marius Gabriel Stancu
PHOTOGRAPHY Xiao Duan
SOUND Davide Bianco, Simone Costamgana
MAKEUP Ornella Angiulli
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Alessandro Lazzi
EDITING ASSISTANT Federico Lena
CASTING Maurizio Ruffo
CAST Vincenzo Crea, Claudio Segaluscio, Giovanni Filannino, Giovanna Rito, Francesco Casulli, Leonardo Resta
ORGANIZATION Daniele Giaisi
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Giulio Donato
ASSISTANT PRODUCER Giusy Argeri
PRODUCER Cosimo Santoro
POST-PRODUCTION Jumping Flea
PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION & SALES The Open Reel
WITH THE SUPPORT OF Apulia Film Commission,
BBC Banca Bari e Taranto
THE DIRECTOR
Born in Bucharest in 1994, in 2016 Marius Gabriel Stancu moved to Italy, where, in 2018, began collaborating with the international sales agency The Open Reel. He wrote several subjects, one of which became later the screenplay for a short he also directed in 2020: It’s Just in My Head. Selected at almost 50 international film festivals, the short was also distributed in DVD and VOD in several territories. Marius’ second short film, entitled The Anniversary, premiered at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in November 2022 and, a few days later, at the Torino International Film Festival. His third short film, shot in 2025, is entitled Erion.