A documentary purist who couldn’t stand reenactments spent three years arguing with a producer whose favourite movie is Heat, and what came out of it is a TIFF film about a Romanian bank robber who learned to run inside a prison yard only 27 steps long.
Mila opens up about the five years he spent following Tiberiu Useriu, known as Tibi, a former jewel thief and bank robber who spent close to a decade in solitary confinement before becoming Romania’s Ice Man and a repeat champion of the 6633 Arctic Ultra across the Canadian North. He talks about why he finds running dull to watch from the outside, and the single sentence Tibi said on their first day together that changed what the film could be. He gets candid about his own resistance to dramatized scenes, casting theatre actors across Romania, and the mayor in Bistrița who let the crew stage a crime scene in town at no charge. Mila walks through his early days shooting stills on the streets of Montreal beside his mentor Daniel Cross, and why the instincts that made his photographs work nearly failed him on video. He also reflects on a father who argued about films he hadn’t seen yet, a grandmother’s translation that made literary history, finishing the story of a mentor who left boxes of unfinished tape behind, and the first film he has ever pitched entirely on his own.
An essential watch for anyone who has ever sworn off the one thing the work turned out to need.
