Rachel Taparjan is a British Romanian filmmaker and academic in North East England, working as a senior lecturer in social work at Teesside University. In her film work, she has directed documentary shorts, but on Tuesday, March 17, she will world premiere her debut feature in the main competition of the 23rd edition of Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, CPH:DOX.
Something Familiar follows the director as she helps a woman, Mihaela, search for her birth mother in Romania by traveling to the orphanage where they were both adopted. On the journey, she gets drawn into her own family’s history and trauma and uncovers a painful legacy that hovers like a dark cloud over the women in the family.
Something Familiar intersperses the journey to Romania with scenes of the filmmaker enlisting, or casting, actresses to sit in for her mother, whom she never really knew, for conversations in chairs set up across from each other.
Family bonds, absence, and trauma loom large as themes in the doc, but so does self-authorship. To be more precise, Something Familiar wonders if we can rewrite familiar narratives.
Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan and Elena Martin of Manifest Film in Romania and Aleksandra Bilic of My Accomplice in the U.K. produced the film, which was co-produced by Dermot O’Dempsey in association with Shudder Films. The cinematographer was Andrei Oană, with editing courtesy of Alice Powell. Stranger Films Sales is handling sales.
In an interview with THR, Taparjan shared insights into the challenges of making the film, the different layers of meaning in the title Something Familiar, her desire to usurp narratives of Romanian orphans, and why she sees much more room for a trauma-informed approach to film production.
Something Familiar is also something very personal for you. You were both in front of and behind the camera for this cinematic journey and made yourself really vulnerable. What was the most challenging part of making the film?
Oh God, how long have you got?! There are so many challenges, but so many good things as well. Being a director and a subject in a film, I think, is quite a unique challenge. You’re wearing two hats, and you’ve got this split psychological experience all the time. Also, I’m a new director, having never done a feature-length documentary. So, I was trying to do this virtually impossible thing of being subject and director, and choosing to disclose really, really difficult things about my own personal life.
I think I’ve become stronger through the process. At the beginning, I was maybe a bit too hesitant. I don’t know if that’s about being inexperienced or about being a woman, or a confluence of factors. But I feel I became stronger in terms of steering the ship as we went on.
And there were a lot of things in terms of ethics and looking after people, an ethics of care. Mihaela was so definite that she wanted to do this, and she was so brave and so cool about it all. But I wanted there to be that support system for her when the cameras weren’t rolling. The same was important for my sister’s testimony. She’s had to endure such a difficult life, so I insisted on a trauma-informed practice.
‘Something Familiar’
Courtesy of Stranger Films Sales
You have some expertise in that, right?
Yes, and we had a psychological consultant working with myself and Mihaela, and then at a different stage of the film, we brought in someone else who was a qualified therapist to really support my sister before, during and after that particular interview.
There was also something that we did with her, which I would really recommend to give people more power, choice and control. What we did was to flip the dynamic around. You only see a little bit in the film. You see her asking me some questions, and we literally swapped seats. So she’s in the director’s position, I’m the subject, and she’s getting to ask me whatever she wants to ask me. Even if it doesn’t appear on screen, I would recommend that to filmmakers. Trauma-informed practice in terms of filmmaking is such an area with room for development. You really do want to look after the people we’re putting in front of us. We have to.
One of my takeaways from Something Familiar was how trauma stays in the family, affecting future generations. What’s your take and insight on that?
The film is really about alchemizing trauma and overcoming trauma. And, of course, it’s about identity, belonging and all those initial things that you think of when you hear that two women are trying to find out the circumstances around their adoption. But what you are talking about is that there is this intergenerational, almost mysterious, transmission of trauma. I’m interested in that.
But even more interesting to me is how those stories play out within family systems. The stories that Mihaela and I were given, for example, about our birth mothers and our country of origin, are really interesting. Speaking for myself, I certainly felt very stigmatized by the Romanian orphan label. That is not an innate feeling, that is not hunger, that is not being too hot or too cold, that’s not biology. It’s something that’s coming from the culture. It’s coming from the stories I’ve been told.
Why would that be a shameful identity to have? Well, I’ll tell you why. Because most of the Western media influences how that country is looked at and how the children are thought about. And there is a white savior narrative. All the documentaries I ever saw about Romanian orphans were about how disturbed these people are. And, none of us were orphans, by the way, our parents hadn’t died, which is actually mislabelling what we were.
‘Something Familiar’
Courtesy of Stranger Films Sales
Do you want to share anything else about Western media stereotypes?
In terms of Western media and the portrayal in them, that was like an antagonist in the back of my head. I mean, there isn’t an antagonist in the film. It’s a documentary, but in my head, that was the antagonist, the traditional Western media portrayals of Romania and, let’s face it, other countries, too. When it comes to foreign adoptions, the country of origin is quite often represented as a gutter, and the people going in to adopt are represented as saviors. It is so much more complicated when it comes to human beings. I think that really drove me to the way I wanted to tell this story and using creativity and using this almost hybrid, more playful way of discovering some of this stuff. I wanted some of that poetry and some of that playfulness here, because I’ve never seen that in another documentary about Romania.
Are there any types of docs that you really enjoy?
I love hybrid documentaries, such as Four Daughters, Dick Johnson Is Dead, and Casting JonBenet. They would have been lurking in the back of my brain. So it would be a disservice to deny that there’s some homage going on.
How did you come up with this idea to cast your mother or invite actresses to sit in for her?
Before finding out that my mum had died in my own search, constantly, if I met a Romanian woman, I would think that she could be related to me. And if it was an older Romanian woman, I thought she could be my mum. And I had this experience at a film festival, where my producer and I were sitting down talking to another Romanian filmmaker, and I thought she could be my mother. And I remember that night thinking, “I could have so many mothers. Why not play with this?” It’s what every adopted person does. I have heard so many foster kids and so many adopted kids say this. So why not play around with this idea of many mothers. And I love using actresses in really interesting ways.
And it was an opportunity for me to give myself the gift of the feminine energy and the archetypal mother, because I didn’t have that in my family. I just found a brother and an uncle who argued with each other.
How early did you find the title of the film?
It was called One of Us, as a working title, for a long time. Then we changed it to Something Familiar, for two reasons. There was a practical reason, some other stuff that was called One of Us. But another thing was that I wanted something more poetic with multiple meanings and multiple interpretations. So, Something Familiar came from that.
The film touches on some darker family trauma that also affects you. How did you approach broaching that in the doc?
I knew that I wanted to be careful about how deeply I would go into it. There is Rachel the character, and then there’s Rachel the person, and there has to be some sovereignty between those two. I understand that it was really relevant for this story that I’ve had some of those experiences that are similar to, or mirror, what happened to my two sisters. I understand that as a director, and I’m willing to give you a little bit of that as a subject. But as a person, I don’t want you raking over every trauma I’ve ever had in great detail. Quite often with people who’ve been through lots of trauma, you need loving people around who are the memory. You need compassionate memory around you, and that will help you.