Name Tatiana Bran Movies Beyond the Hills | Role Writer | |
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Autoportret tatiana niculescu bran p3
Tatiana Niculescu Bran is a Romanian writer and former senior editor of the Bucharest Romanian Bureau of the BBC WS. She previously worked for 8 years as a radio presenter and producer of the World Service in London. Her non fiction novel Deadly Confession (Spovedanie la Tanacu) was published in 2006 by Humanitas Publishing House. It was followed by Judges’ Book (Cartea Judecatorilor). A second edition and e-book of Deadly Confession were issued by Polirom Publishing House in 2012. The novels caused a sensation in her native country and inspired the film director Cristian Mungiu who produced and directed the film Beyond the Hills based on the same novels. The film won the award for the best screenplay at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. In 2007 a stage version of the books directed by the American-Romanian director Andrei Serban was performed at La MaMa Theatre in New York. In 2008, the theatre performance was staged in Paris at the Behague Palace. Peter Brook and Pascal Bruckner attended the performance.
Contents
- Autoportret tatiana niculescu bran p3
- Autoportret tatiana niculescu bran p1
- Deadly Confession Plot Summary
- References
In December 2014, Klaus Iohannis, the incoming President of Romania, named her as his press secretary. She resigned the following April, citing an unsatisfactory relationship with the press.
Autoportret tatiana niculescu bran p1
"Deadly Confession" Plot Summary
Based on true events documented by Tatiana Niculescu Bran the novels tell the story of two female friends who spent their childhood in a state orphanage, subjected to systematic abuse. At the age of 18 they split and take different paths. Before Irina's final emigration to Germany she pays a visit to her best friend and teenage lover, the novice Kitza, in a remote convent in rural Romania. Irina hopes to win back her lover’s heart. But Kitza worships God and in her new religious life there is no place left for their old ways... Irina’s orphanage-derived rawness spills over into open conflict with the sedate moral proprieties of the convent. She suffers a violent fit after Kitza reveals their sexual experiences in the orphanage to Father Daniel. The nuns and their allies struggle to bundle Irina into a Dacia car and have her carted off to the nearest hospital.
Diagnosed as schizophrenic, Irina is moved from one medical ward to another Heavily sedated and neglected by the medical staff Irina is only cared for by visiting nuns. She reminisces about her sexual experiences with an earlier girlfriend in the orphanage, their fear of rape and fights to defend themselves, and the photo sessions organised by a German paedophile by the name of Pfaff, who, for several years, ran a pornographic studio in a rented flat nearby the orphanage.
In the convent, Father Daniel prepares for the weekend mass followed by the extremely popular “healing sessions” with pilgrims from all over the county. He studies texts on religious healing published by contemporary theologians. Description of the Romanian Orthodox Church split between pro-Western, ecumenical priests and hard-line traditionalists, the latter passionately supported by Father Daniel. Irina is discharged from hospital despite not feeling well.The medical staff maintain she’s likely to get better care in the convent. Back at the convent, she is given a guide comprising a list of more than two hundred sins and is required to tick the ones she has committed. It dawns on her that earlier premonitions of hellfire or her childhood hobbies for football and martial arts might have resulted in serious sins. She ticks masturbation, described as “making love to the Devil” in her booklet. Irina does penance, receives Communion and seems to get better.
After several days Irina and the nuns go to the Transylvanian village of Cuptoare. After leaving the orphanage, both Irina and her retarded brother had found shelter and employment with a wealthy family here, the Stolojescus, who keep the 4000 euros Irina earned during her first stay in Germany. The Stolojescus are very hospitable but Irina is troubled to find out that they had already replaced her with another abandoned girl and made use of her money. She is overcome by confusion: she fears God’s punishment for her sins; she feels insecure because of her complete lack of money; she ponders her decision to become a nun and give up the chance to live and work in Germany; she is terrified she’d be seen and referred to as “the devil’s mad whore”; one night she starts kicking everything and everyone around her.
Father Daniel feels more and more inspired by the religious healing sessions held by other priests in Moldova and their techniques. Dostoyevsky-like description of a “colony of men possessed by evil spirits” in Zvoristea, Moldova. While Irina is seized by another fit, Father Daniel and the nuns have to deal with the pilgrims attending the Ascension ceremonies. To keep up appearances they isolate Irina in her cell, tying her to her bed. The exorcism proper starts after Ascension, with the priest in front of the altar, reading the traditional Orthodox prayers for casting away the devil. Still agitated and hurling insults, Irina is tied to a makeshift stretcher in the shape of a cross and brought inside the church. For two days and nights the priest and the nuns fast and pray to cast away the demons they believe are possessing her. Irina’s desperate attempts to make sense of previous episodes in her life interspersed with her hallucinations. Father Daniel feels proud he has seemingly healed Irina and therefore gained prestige for his convent. But Irina faints. An undertrained, emotional ambulance doctor can’t establish whether Irina is dead or alive and decides to give her a big dose of adrenaline and take her to hospital, accompanied by the nuns. The medical corps takes possession of Irina’s corpse. A manager in the emergency unit dictates a report which exonerates the doctors, saying Irina had been dead for a number of hours while the despondent nuns maintain they spoke to her just before calling the ambulance. The nuns and the priest are arrested and sentenced to jail.
In 2011 Tatiana Niculescu Bran wrote the political novel The Nights of the Patriarch.
In 2012 Polirom Publishing House published her novel In the Land of God, an African story about the ritual of young girls' genital mutilation FGM.