Alex Heeney reviews the personal documentary film Tata by Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc. The film follows Lina as she reconnects with her estranged father and begins to ponder the origins of her intergenerational trauma and how to prevent passing it on to the daughter she’s expecting. Tata is one of the best sales titles at TIFF 2024
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Tata is a quietly powerful story of director Lina Vdovîi reconnecting with her abusive father. Estranged for over a decade, Vdovîi has made a career as a journalist helping the helpless. In the meantime, her father has become a victim of employer abuse. When he gets in touch out of the blue because he’s doing poorly, Lina, with husband and co-director Radu Ciorniciuc in tow, decides to pay her father a visit where he now lives in Italy. Although Lena grew up in Moldova, her father moved abroad when she was still a girl, meaning they’ve been estranged for years.
On arriving in Italy, Lina finds herself in the strange position of having the power to help her downtrodden father who was once her tormenter. Having spent her early years rendering her powerless, Lina’s father is now the victim of abuse from an employer who cruelly leverages Lina’s father’s status as a caretaker and immigrant.
As Lina and her father plot to get documentary evidence of his boss’s wrongdoings, Lina finds herself struggling with something more difficult. Is she more like her father than she’d like to think? How did feeling controlled as a child make her controlling as an adult? And how much is her father merely a bad person versus the product of a violent and abusive society? These soul-searching questions propel Lina to visit her mother, family, and childhood community in Moldova to learn about the culture that shaped her father into someone who believed beating his children was just good parenting.
Broadening the canvas of the intimate Tata
Tata starts as an intimate story of a possible reconnection between father and daughter, but quickly becomes a story of cycles of abuse, the society that condones it, and how we prevent ourselves from passing on intergenerational trauma to our children. Lina is pregnant with her first child, so part of her journey in the film to reconnect with her father and his past is about trying to deal with her demons before her daughter arrives. In this way, it recalls the excellent Canadian short Anotc ota ickwaparin akosiin at this year’s festival.
Lina’s journey is documented by her husband, Romanian co-director Radu Ciornicuc, whose Acasa, My Home was also a Seventh Row favourite. The cameraman is often seen on screen talking to Lina or in a mirror, emphasizing the intimate nature of the film. The film feels especially unstaged and raw because of the occasional microphone gaffe or messy camerawork.
Although this is Vdovîi’s story, we often see or hear Radu on camera, challenging Lina’s narrative about herself and her father in a way only a husband could: gently, lovingly, and perceptively. Personal documentaries about excavating family trauma have become a genre unto themselves lately, counting Still Processing, North by Current and this year’s A Family among them. But rarely does the filmmaker actually find themselves challenged by the person who knows them best — who also has a say in the making of the film. As Lina acknowledges and addresses the hard truths raised by Radu, the film transforms from a father-daughter story into an excavation of toxic cultural norms and intergenerational trauma.
