Constantin is a Moldovan film director grown up in Rome who is about to get married. He decides to go back to his home country after many years to discover his cultural roots, from which his family keeps distance. He find a country that after thirty years of Independence from URSS had to fight to defend its autonomy and cultural identity and now it has to face the expanding of the Ukraine war. Constantin understand that he is not part of those historical events. The fact the he was born in Moldova is not enough to be considered and to feel a real Moldovan. He will have to choose if to stay there to understand more about the culture and to integrate, or to go back to Italy, where to start a family and to accept his nomad status.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
The idea of Constantin of Bessarabia comes from the desire to reunite with my home country and to discover more about the Moldovan culture, from which my family kept distance. My childhood memories starts from the arrive in Italy and I grown up believing that Moldova was a backward country, suppressed from Russia. When I interviewed my brother and my parents, I found out that my considerations about our home country were the same as theirs. Born and growing up during Soviet period, but graduated and became parents at the beginning of the Independence from URSS, they had to deal with a poor country where the privatization of the lands has privileged dishonest people and members of the old regime and forced them to emigrate still young, accepting to separate from their children.
While watching local news, reading books and treaties about history and identity of the Republic of Moldova, I discovered that there were others different points of views. I found out that the Moldovan people fought and still do for their autonomy. As it’s written in Charles King’s book The Moldovans: Romania, Russia and the Politics of Culture, the Tsarist empire first and the Soviet Union after have suppressed this population so they could loose a sight over their Romanian ethnic, cultural and linguistic belonging. So I decided to leave for Moldova and to film places and people met during the journey, I wanted to make a documentary film about the solidity of our own roots. Despite of my expectation, the difficulties in understanding and integration have given to it a more dramatic narrative point of view. With my research, I understood that my personal story and the one of Republic of Moldova, despite being inextricably linked, went in different directions. After the emigration of the 90s, the country has experienced processes of radical change that have led to the current political and cultural identity. In the meantime, the emigrated Moldovans had built their life in the hosted countries and chose to educate the new generations according the customs and traditions of the country where they live. Constantin of Bessarabia tells therefore a story about a young emigrated man who wants to reconnect with his home country, in a world where globalization, wars and inequalities favor the constant movement of people and cultural assimilation.