Acasa, My Home

Acasa, My Home

Save for the towers in view, you’d think the opening sequence of “Acasa, My Home” a film that is at once deeply tender and deeply probing was shot in a vast wilderness. Our eyes skim over the sun-dappled surface of a muddy marsh during this first scene, following a teenage boy swimming through what appear to be paradisiacal murky waters and catching fish with his bare hands; it seems like he’s right outside the city.

Soon other boys join him, their happy sounds reaching us as a cacophony before their faces appear on screen; they watch their older brother deftly catch a wild water bird. When the poor terrified winged creature manages to escape and run for its life, they go back to their fun, rolling around in mud and giggling and wrestling in tall reeds.

Then the drone camera wistfully peels away from this delightful tableau to slowly reveal Bucharest from above sets Romania’s bustling capital against the children’s habitat. All are part of the same family: The Enaches are an off the grid clan who have been living in an abandoned reservoir on the outskirts of Bucharest (dubbed the Bucharest Delta) for almost two decades.

They’re like a tiny village that functions as one unit early on in “Acasa,” an extraordinary debut documentary by filmmaker and investigative journalist Radu Ciorniciuc. With 11 members parents Gica and Niculina Enache and nine kids it could also be called a small tribe or even just an extended family. It operates under patriarchy (Gica calls all the shots), but every member has an assigned role in their shared unorthodox existence. Every action is survival when you live with nothing in makeshift hovels among animals (pigs, chickens, dogs) on land covered by tall grasses without access to any urban amenities beyond basic supplies.

In some ways, “Acasa, My Home” is a real-world “Leave No Trace” Debra Granik’s recent American drama about an off-the-grid father and daughter rejecting the conventions of mainstream society. Like that movie, Ciorniciuc offers viewers a non-didactic nonjudgmental window into an alternative world where parents raise babies by nature’s rules while also stripping them of basic rights like safety and education. The kids seem perfectly adjusted to their way of life in the country, though; when child services start showing up with concerned authorities, there’s routine talk among them about hiding in their usual spots.

Given that many of us with basic necessities might be tempted to pass judgment on how the family treats the nature around them, what the Enaches are doing and living feels coherent within Ciorniciuc’s granularly textured, eye level frame. (Most of the time it just sits there unostentatiously, letting people walk in front of and away from it.)

But this organic balance is shattered abruptly and brutally for them when the Romanian government makes good on its long-held plan to turn their land into a “nature reserve.” The officials show up with their orders soon after that. And for a moment, as he once was the groundskeeper here, Gica gets a kind of synthetic deference from social services.

Somewhere in between these beats Prince Charles pops by during a media circus to lend his weight to an initiative that appears to have international implications. But things go sideways when social services move the family into a cramped apartment where they would have to coexist with other families under community rules; something Gica had managed to avoid like hell since forever.

Guess who takes to civilization quickest? Illiterate and cut off until now, all but one of the Enache kids prove adept at learning. And four years gives even an amateur filmmaker unprecedented access: Ciorniciuc records their evolution with tender insistence. Henceforth there will be haircuts and schoolwork and much phone-staring among them; which Ciorniciuc captures observantly but without fuss as his focus shifts from parent to child.

But this isn’t exactly an uplifting fable about adapting to city life. As the kids especially Vali, who’s oldest negotiate between worlds, old-world grudges crest and heartbreaking generational clashes ensue; some younger children express missing Delta freedom while resenting parents for not bothering to teach them how to read or write.

In trying neatly tie up this knotty narrative in its final minutes, the filmmaker feels like he’s starting another story altogether with his compact 80-something minute film; one that would involve new jobs, a birth, terrifyingly murky futures and higher stakes in an unforgiving concrete jungle.

Watch Acasa My Home For Free On Gomovies.