
Love Is Not an Orange. 2022. Belgium/Moldova/Netherlands/France. Directed by Otilia Babara. North American premiere. In Romanian; English subtitles. 73 min.
In the early 1990s, women left Moldova in large numbers to provide for their families amid the economic hardship wrought by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Mothers unwittingly living out the transition to market capitalism seized on new forms of exchange to maintain family bonds from afar. From Western Europe, they would mail gifts: sweets, blue jeans, toys, and oranges; in return, children would send videotapes with news from home. Otilia Babara’s touching documentary, assembled from private video archives of this widespread, often multiyear family ritual, recounts a collective experience of migration for a nation that had “gained its independence but lost its mothers.” Though childhood excitement over the care packages gradually morphed into teenage ambivalence, these intimate recordings attest to the depths of maternal love and the bittersweet realities of a new political era.