Ionaș
Dreams of Rain is a 2017 28-minute short directed by Dragoș Hanciu
made as part of the Aristoteles workshop held in Maramureș, the aim of which is
to produce a film from start to finish in five weeks. It won the best documentary award at the
workshop.
Elderly Ionaș stays in a caravan
to be able to walk his cornfield at night.
He has to protect it against the wild boars that come out from the
forest and raid his crop despite the electric fence and the cannon, the booms
of which punctuate the silence.
It is a lonely existence, broken
only by a visit from his brother-in-law.
There is a lot of sitting with his thoughts for company, and time hangs
heavy, his patrols punctuated by dozing and staring at his watch.
He reminisces a little about his
earliest days. The Russians arrived
during the war, chasing out the Hungarians, when he was only three days old,
and he spent two nights under a bridge.
But we never learn about his background or history.
Much of his talk is about
dreams. He says sleep is only a step
away from death because we are not aware of anything; dreaming indicates we are
not dead, and he notes that after dreaming of someone who is dead, it will rain
at some point.
He mentions he had been dreaming
of his father, and it begins to rain.
Unfortunately the rain tends to bring the boars with it, though on this
night they do not appear. Life is short,
Ionaș says, and fades like a dream. Dawn
comes, and the final shot is of him lying in bed, so still he could be dead.
The film is on the Cinepub
website: http://en.cinepub.ro/movie/ionas-dreams-of-rain-documentary-film/
