Alexandra Diaconu

A group of men share a small space in a prison metal workshop in Botosani, Romania. When they’re not working, they animatedly discuss religion and hypocrisy, lament during tea that they don’t have onions for sausage, or joke and sing.

F. has been living in Bucharest for four years since fleeing Afghanistan with her family. The thoughtful 18-year-old films her life in the Romanian capital: her trips to the park, life at home with her brothers and sisters, and the conversations she has with her Romanian friends. When the Covid-19 pandemic approaches, bringing a lockdown, she has to spend a month indoors. She kills time with funny observations of life outdoors, filmed through the window.

Raluca, 26, freshly returned from Berlin to a spring-warm Bucharest hit by the pandemic, works as a home-deliverer for supermarket products. One day one of her clients turns out to be a young guy with a good sense of humor and a cute cat, so when Raluca’s bike ride through a nightmarish traffic in Bucharest and guys grabbing her on every street corner, she becomes slightly idyllic bearing the hope of a new love story. Encouraged by her girlfriends, Raluca finds a pretext to invite herself into the guy’s house, but the imagination is almost always more interesting than reality.

Fragments of memories are brought to the surface by the Danube Waltz, revealing the less-known history of the Danube-Black Sea Canal. While borders between filmmaker and actress become blurry, languages and layers of past intertwine.

The film confronts the reality of cultural displacement and the search for identity, framed by my family’s own longing for the Romanian culture, absent in American surroundings. There Are No Fir Trees Here is a story about the spaces we inhabit and the yearning for a place that feels like home.

During the pandemic, a grieving family finds solace through black humor and video calls with relatives from abroad.