(The 2024 Toronto International Film Festival runs September 5-15 and HtN has you covered once again. Check out Chris Reed’s Tata movie review. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
Abusive parenting cuts deep, leaving serious wounds that may never heal. What doesn’t help the recovery is the refusal of the cruel party to let you go. On top of previous injuries now comes the need to find the strength to mend on one’s own. Though perhaps forced self-rehabilitation may ultimately lead to a more complete wellness. Maybe, maybe not.
In Tata, her debut feature, Moldovan-born journalist Lina Vdovîi and her husband, Radu Ciorniciuc (Acasă, My Home), explore the ways in which past trauma informs the present. How they get to that theme is what makes this documentary especially powerful and fresh, even as it tackles the age-old problem of toxic masculinity. After years of having very limited contact with the father who made her childhood a living hell, Vdovîi now faces a dilemma: to help the man or let him rot.
Pavel Vdovîi, when we meet him, is a migrant worker in Italy, a country to which he decamped in the late 1990s for better employment opportunities. That move saved Lina and her family—all of whom suffered at the hands of dad, including Lina’s mother—by allowing them a respite from Pavel’s controlling and violent behavior. But as things begin to sour for him in his current situation, he turns to Lina, whom he thinks might have contacts that can solve his problem.
He, the abuser, is at present himself being abused by a boss who takes advantage of immigrant labor. Lina outfits her father with a hidden camera and microphone, using the footage so captured to approach an Italian lawyer for a lawsuit. That’s what good daughters with her skillset do. But why, in this case, does this daughter decide to assist such a man?
The short and simple answer is that life, and our reactions to it, is complicated. Fortunately for the movie, we get far more than the simple answer. Lina wrestles with her motivations, meditating not only on her relationship to Pavel but on the ways that his treatment of her has affected her own choices. She was married once before, and admits that things went bad so quickly because of her own controlling behavior. Such introspection has allowed her and Radu to do better. Which is good, because she is also pregnant.
The movie does not stay in Italy. We travel to Moldova—a Romanian-majority country located between Romania and Ukraine—meeting Lina’s relatives, including her grandmother, mother, and sister, in order for the director to make sense of how the patriarchal traditions of the land continue to linger. Pavel returns, as well, and despite an earlier reconciliation with Lina, where he admitted fault for previous sins, appears to revert to some of his old ways. Is there any way forward when we are prisoners of our upbringing?
That is ultimately the question that Lina asks, over and over, and if there are no clear answers, that’s because nothing is so easy. It’s a deeply intimate story, though, and quite moving, with Radu’s handheld camera capturing the details of faces and landscapes in all their austere beauty. “Tata” may himself be unable to completely reform, but we can all learn from his and Lina’s story and take solace that, for Lina, at least, there is a brighter future than what came before.
– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)
Toronto International Film Festival; Tata;Lina Vdovîi, Radu Ciorniciuc
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