The Missing One

I met up again with my older sister after several years of separation. Prey to morphine, she lives a secluded life in her truck. As we spend time together, our words become easier, plunging us into a long drawn-out night.

The film begins leaning over a double black hole. Image-wise: a gulf opened by the backwash of a murky bluegreen sea. Sound-wise, revealed by a sentence that serves as a premise – one haunted by an unbearable absence. “One day I felt alone and I thought of my elder sister Iona.” Rareş Ienasoaie is the man speaking, he made the film to find his sister. Yet, she has not disappeared. She has been forgotten, of her own free will and by force, in the truck where she lives alone, another black hole, ending up there due to stubborn independence and drug addiction. Between Ioana and her family, tewlve years of silence have set in, and the brother no longer wants to bear the weight of this guilty silence. This means that filming will not be a pretext for finding Ioana, but rather a way of learning how to look at her. This is why the film only slowly – its painful accuracy comes at this price – reveals the sister’s portrait. First, it has to tame the gaze it poses on her, drink in the disarray inspired by her face wounded by solitude and morphine, and also accept hearing that Ioana says she is happy, in her own way. Only then can the portrait begin, once the eye has been washed by the camera. And at the same time as the portrait, an attempt at exorcism, from the depths of the black hole where Ioana, with a head lamp as her only lighting, pushes her poison into her forearm. From here, the childhood memories resurface, tamed by drugs, offered to the brother who had come to break their shared curse, and to the film, which has no fear of black holes.

Jérôme Momcilovic