A HEART SHAPED BALLOON

Anechitoaia (17) is an orphan struggling to make a living on the streets of Constanta. He falls in love with Veli (20) but their fragile love is put to the test when Anechitoaia is suspected of killing an old man.

What fascinated me is Anechitoaia, the main character. Anechitoaia spent his childhood in a communist orphanage located in a Romanian port town where the eastern traffic meets the temptation of luxury ships coming from the West. Constanta is now the last border of the European Union at the Black Sea. Anechitoaia has simple desires. He grew up learning that he has to be bad in order to survive. He doesn't talk much but through his actions he proves that he still has something pure, unspoiled, inside him. Anechitoaia is proof that a seed of goodness remains in us all the time that germinates and grows. Falling in love with Veli, he changes during the movie, transforming from a kid grown up and humiliated in a dirty orphanage, into a prince Miskin from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. Anechitoaia is the idiot who, through his purity, naïveté and goodness, changes the life of the other characters. He offers us, the audience a new way of understanding things. Anechitoaia sacrifices in the end, closing the circle of his idealism but leaving in every viewer a trace of his purity. It's my duty as a director to bring this character and his story on the screen.