A River’s Gaze

Lavinia is a tempest. She’s impulsive, she miscalculates and doesn’t know very well how to love. She wants to be a good mother for her fourteen year old son Dani: her house is to become a palace and they are to live under bluer skies. As the four seasons pass by, the two find themselves in a push and pull, under the quiet, watchful presence of the river. Lavinia’s unresolved love affair with her ex-partner, ends up shaping not just the choices she makes, but also Dani’s future. Down in their valley, many things remain unsaid while grief lingers beneath the surface. 

Andreea Borțun works as an artist, visual researcher and educator, teaching as an assistant professor at The National Film School in Bucharest (UNATC).All her recent projects are rooted in anthropological research. She combines the theoretical, pedagogical and field work with her artistic practice. This usually involves a process type of filmmaking, focused on a close observation of environments and communities, and their specific ways of relating sensorially to the world. She uses the visual and audio mediums as extensions of her own perception. Her work is usually a mix of hybridity, sometimes coming from fiction and moving towards documentary, sometimes the other way around. Her previous films have been selected in Cannes’s Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, Toronto or Karlovy Vary. Since 2014 she curates and imagines experimental narrative methodologies for cinema, at the Pustnik International Screenwriters Residency. She co-translated Steven Maras’ book Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice. Andreea is currently conducting her Phd, focusing on alternative screenwriting practices, drawn from anthropological research. She is one of the 2026 grantees of the Saari fellowship, in Finland, offered by Kone Foundation. She is currently working on her sophomore feature film The Life and Times of Ion G, the second part of a trilogy on love in the rural. A River’s Gaze is here first feature film.