Lemonade
Directed by Ioana Uricaru
Vermont | 2018 | Fiction | 88 min | Romanian/English w/English subtitles
Vermont Premiere
Sponsor: Middlebury College
Followed by Q&A with Filmmaker and lead actress
While working in the U.S. on a temporary visa as a caretaker, Mara (Malina Manovici, who debuted in Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation, shown at VTIFF 2017), a 30-year-old single mother from Romania, marries Daniel, an American. After the arrival of her son Dragos, everything seems to have fallen perfectly into place. But when the process of getting a green card veers unexpectedly off course, Mara is faced with abuses of power on every level and is forced to answer a dark question about herself: how far will she go to get what she wants. Writer-director Ioana Uricaru is a professor of film at Middlebury College. This is her first feature. To quote her, the film is “sparked by a true story and grew into a screenplay based on my own experience of discovering the American way of life and the differences between the American and Romanian world views.”