Reviews

This is a shallow but still entertaining comedy about some teenager's adventures in trying to become the next Miss Litoral, "Miss Seaside" in post -revolutionary Romania, in 1994. Driven by an ambitious mother who sees in the title an opportunity to make her daughter a star, our heroine is forced to participate in numerous beauty contests. The entire family travels to Constanta, to the Black Sea, because as everybody knows, there is the high-life. Her boyfriend follows her in a misadventure of his own. Finally they are reunited and live happy ever after. Not to mention that she wins with flying colors.

Nice last appearances of some popular Romanian comedy stars. If you wonder about everyday life after the Romanian Revolution, about that times of confusion and about the new "democracy", this film is for you. You can still see remnants of Communism (that ghastly hotels, the Romanian DACIA-cars...)and make fun of our "liberated minds" - a lot of gratuitous nudity. Hey, after so many years of censure under a dictator what do you expect?

I saw this documentary and translated the subtitles for the ASTRA Film festival in Sibiu 2008. While translating I said to myself "Not another movie about gypsies" and expected the screening with not too much enthusiasm. But...it turned out to be more than wonderful short documentary about the life of a gypsy family in Finland.

Of course, there are numerous problems arising form the clash of cultures. While son Benja tries to break free from the "Gipsyness" and be his own master, free of cultural taboos, and Mirella, the troubled teenage daughter struggles to find a job and a direction in life, mother Inga is left alone to keep her family together, to talk some sense into Benja and reach Mirella in her stubbornness and fake toughness. But even more, the film is about the parent-child relationship, about family ties, cultural and social responsibility. I found it moving and "sweet".