EU CONTEZ
Romania, Germany, Belgium
2026 | 100 min. | Fiction

With her eighteenth birthday approaching, Rebeca, a young Roma girl, faces imminent expulsion from the orphanage she has called home. She clings to the hope that her father's release from prison will finally give her the family she has always longed for. When she is accepted into university to study acting, another world opens up to her. But just as Rebeca begins to find her place there, her father is released – and turns out to be far from the superhero she had imagined. Leaving the orphanage becomes increasingly real: the home she has spent years wanting to escape is also the only one she knows. At university, Rebeca is tasked with a seemingly simple exercise: create a piece about "home". To complete it, she must reveal to her new classmates the very life she has been trying to keep hidden from them. Caught between the orphanage she is terrified to leave and the new life she is only beginning to enter, Rebeca struggles to keep her worlds from colliding. But as those worlds begin to close in around her, she is forced to make choices she can no longer postpone and to find a new way forward.

Directed by: Alina Șerban
Written by: Alina Șerban
Produced by: Ada Solomon, Carla Fotea, Harry Flöter, Jörg Siepmann, Cassandre Warnauts, Jean Yves Roubin, Dries Phlypo, Leontine Petit, Erik Glijnis Glijnis
Cinematography: Nona Cătușanu
Editing: Letiția Ștefănescu
Production Design: Andreea Popa, Bianca Micu
Costume Design: Dana Anghel
Make-Up & Hair: Bianca Boeroiu, Iulia Roseanu
Original Score: Vlaicu Golcea
Sound: Lise Bouchez, Jean-Stéphane Garbe
Casting: Liliana Toma
Cast: Denisa Farcaș (Rebeca), Sorin Mihai (Aurel), Angelina Pavel (Simona), Vanessa Dencea (Elena), Raisa Mihai (Isabel), Alexandru Stancu (Vlad)

Statement of the director:
As a Roma woman, I have faced many difficulties that have shaped the way I see the world, including poverty, discrimination and even eviction from my childhood home. Growing up, I was made to feel ashamed of being Roma. It took me years to let go of that shame and embrace my culture. But it took me even longer to speak freely about what spending part of my youth in a children’s home meant to me.
My gaze as a filmmaker comes from the worlds I have lived in and the lives I have witnessed around me. For the past 17 years, through theatre and film, I have aimed to present the humanity of the Roma and to create and claim space for our stories from a Roma perspective. Roma people have often been the subject of films, but Roma perspectives remain very rare in cinema. Even when Roma characters appear on screen, we rarely get to see the complexity of their lives: their contradictions, desires, vulnerability, love and humanity. Roma women’s perspectives are even more rare. I MATTER comes from a unique and intersectional perspective, exploring a reality almost nonexistent in cinema: what it means to be a girl, to be Roma and to live in a children’s home. Through Rebeca’s eyes, I want to invite the audience into this world and to understand what it is like to live as a minority in a society where being “normal” so often means being white and growing up in a family.

Production:
Microfilm
https://www.microfilm.eu/

World Sales:
Pluto Film