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British-Romanian filmmaker Rachel Taparjan likes to quote George Bernard Shaw when talking about her debut feature, “Something Familiar.” The “Pygmalion” playwright said, “If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best take it out and teach it to dance.”
The film, which premiered this week in the main competition of CPH:DOX, Copenhagen’s documentary festival, follows Taparjan as she helps Mihaela, who was adopted from the same Romanian orphanage as the director, seek out her birth mother, before Taparjan embarks on her own search for her siblings.
“The film is about hope and overcoming adversity and trauma,” Taparjan tells Variety, adding that the focus is on the universal themes of identity and belonging.
Mihaela had been raised on a farm in Manitoba, Canada, and now lives in North Carolina, whereas Taparjan, who is a university lecturer and a qualified social worker, lives in North-East England.
“Mihaela and I started this journey not knowing what we would find, but there was the drive to find out who we are, where we came from, and some of the circumstances around why we ended up in an orphanage in Romania,” Taparjan says.
The seed for the project was planted when Taparjan received an email from Mihaela out of the blue about six years ago. “It said something along the lines of, ‘You don’t know me, but we were adopted from the same orphanage at the same time. I’d like to go back to Romania. Will you help?’” Taparjan recalls.
“I’d just got back from Romania, and I wasn’t ready at all to engage in that process, so I ignored her for quite some time, and then, eventually, got back in touch with her and said, ‘You know, I’m ready. I’ll help.’
“She wanted to go to the orphanage, but then I said, ‘What about finding your mum?’ And then that became another focus that we had together. So, yeah, she was ready. She wanted to embark on this journey long before I did.”
Taparjan adds that the portrayal in the media of Romania and its people was, inadvertently, “quite stigmatizing,” but her film will deliver a different take on the country’s history. Referencing the phrase, “Nothing about us, without us,” Taparjan says the fact that Mihaela and she are “insiders telling this story is really interesting because [during the film] we are learning things as the audience is, and our pre-existing narratives are subverted, along with the audience’s.”
One pivotal moment in the film is when they go to the orphanage in Romania where they had been placed before adoption. “People talk about embodied memory, and I was cognitively aware of it and interested in it, but I’d never really felt it,” Taparjan says. “And, my gosh, when we got to that orphanage, something happened to both of us.”
Explaining what she means by “embodied memory,” Taparjan says, “I suppose the nearest thing that we talk about is déjà vu. It’s like, ‘I’ve been here before,’ or ‘Something’s happened here before.’
“I felt very, very emotional in a certain room in that orphanage, and I didn’t expect to feel that. We later found out that that’s where the children were kept – in that room. Now, what was going on there? I don’t know. I can’t prove it. I have no scientific backup for this. I just know that I was overcome by something, and it was when I was in that room as an adult that I would have been in as a baby. And there are other moments of that as well, sort of carrying the memory of something in the body, beneath conscious memory, beneath conscious thought.”
In order to understand the societal and political context in which their biological mothers put their daughters in the orphanage, Taparjan “lifts the lid on the pronatalist policies [in communist Romania] and how that actually impacted the women,” she says. Taparjan wanted to show that their biological mothers “weren’t cold, unfeeling, all those Eastern European tropes. That’s not the case. These women were subjugated. I mean, there was such a restriction on bodily autonomy. I just didn’t really realize the extent of it.”
Romania has a grim history when it comes to sexual and reproductive health rights, according to Human Rights Watch. In 1966, the then-government adopted Decree 770 which, in the name of driving population growth, imposed draconian bans on access to contraception and abortion.
The fact that both Taparjan and Mihaela came from the same orphanage and at the exact same time adds a twist to the tale. “I didn’t realize the complexity of that until making this film, and the fact that my parents chose me instead of her. I didn’t realize that it was that sliding doors kind of thing.”
A turning point in the film comes, Taparjan says, when “Mihaela learns something from the family members we managed to find that makes her completely reframe her identity and her existence, what she knew versus what she now knows. It completely flips it.”
In terms of telling her own story, Taparjan faced a dilemma. “I couldn’t meet my mum because I found out that she died. So how do you do that? How do you talk to the dead? Does cinema and filmmaking offer a way to do that? Well, it kind of does, or it kind of did for me. So, using … I don’t even want to say fictionalized elements, but by working with actresses and different devices, I kind of did get to speak to a mother, or revive the idea of a mother. But maybe the archetype of a mother is really present within this film, despite the absence of meeting our actual mothers. So, I really thought about how to tell the story differently in that sense.”
However, Taparjan does connect with her siblings in the film. “What I find in terms of my siblings, I think that’s probably the biggest twist in the film, finding out what they went through. And then I suppose the final twist is how similar some of my own life trajectory has been to theirs, particularly my sisters, which was a bit spooky because we didn’t know each other. We weren’t raised together. Really similar types of adversity and trauma. So that’s another twist. So, where does that come from? The nature versus nurture debate is very alive throughout the film.”
The film’s title, “Something Familiar,” reflects this theme in the film, “playing around with that kind of spooky, eerie thing that none of us can quite explain.” The title also refers to “searching for the familiar in the faces of the family members that we managed to find, because it’s an obsession for every adopted person: Who do I look like? I mean, it sounds really superficial, but it’s so big. And searching for the familiar in what we find, and then the familiar finding us in stuff we can’t explain,” Taparjan says.
Making the film has changed Taparjan, for the good. Referencing Shaw’s quote about teaching the skeleton in your closet to dance, she says, “Within documentary, there’s always uncertainty. But you have to dance with the uncertain. We’re letting all these truths out, and then what’s going to happen? How is it going to affect us all?
“And for me, I now have contact with these siblings that I have never known before, and I’ve gone on this journey – some of it, I think, has been cathartic for me. I hesitate to say therapeutic, because I’ve got my therapist and that’s therapeutic, but certainly some catharsis and creativity can alchemize trauma in some way that therapy doesn’t necessarily do. There’s something that the creative process has brought me that I couldn’t have got in individual therapy, I think.”
Her adoptive parents had initially been supportive with regards to the project, but she isn’t in touch with them at present. “They don’t want to have any contact with me and haven’t for about two and a half years. So, there’s been loss involved in the filmmaking as well,” she says. “In the early days – we’re talking four and a half, five years ago – I did some interviews with them, and they were on board to do that, which was good, and they wanted to give their perspective and their memories of the place and what it meant to them, and their story was so essential to be included in this film, because their decision to adopt was prompted by the fact that their own daughter died suddenly when she was 14, and that whole thing of the choice between Mihaela and I … that decision, and grief and loss and how it guided the decisions that they made, and how it influenced the family breakdown between me and them, I think it can all be charted back to unresolved, traumatic loss.”
Taparjan’s background in social work and her academic research into overcoming trauma had an influence on how she approached the film. “I would like to think it’s fed in by taking a trauma-informed approach to filmmaking. I would like to think that. I mean, you’d have to ask other people who are in the film if they feel that. But, like really being concerned about the ethics and the safety of people within the film. I mean, particularly with my sister Ana. She was really wanting to tell her story, but there’s a real fragility to Ana. She’s been through probably more than anybody else I know. I mean in terms of the level of adversity and trauma, and just really making sure there was caretaking around her whole involvement, and that the preparation was done properly, and that the aftercare was there if she wanted it, and also throughout the filming, you know, having a therapist on set and so on. So, I hope that that’s influenced my approach to filmmaking, because I’ve spent all day teaching about trauma and attachment and transaction and you name it. So, I hope that care, that ethics of care, crossed over.”
The producers are Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan and Elena Martin at Manifest Film in Romania. The co-producers are Aleksandra Bilic of My Accomplice and Dermot O’Dempsey of Shudder Films in the U.K. World sales are being handled by Tijana Djukic at Stranger Film Sales.
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