Ioana Turcan traveled overseas from Gherla, Romania, to make films that could bring a face to the marginalized communities she saw being stereotyped as a child.

Turcan, a second-year graduate film student in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, recently produced the film “The Other Life of Charon,” a documentary depicting the Roma community in Romania. The film focuses on a Roma family who are thought of as beneath and out of touch with the community around them.

“I’m trying to represent things that are not so represented in the media,” Turcan said.

Since its completion, “The Other Life of Charon” has been accepted to several festivals in Barcelona and the Czech Republic, and has had a showing in Switzerland. Turcan also submitted the film to festivals in Romania, and now the film is at the height of its distribution.

“It’s kind of experimental film,” Turcan said. “You don’t have talking heads. No one is talking to you.”

Turcan was born a few months after the Communist regime in Romania fell in the early ’90s. Growing up as an only child, Turcan said she was introduced to movies through Spanish soap operas and the cartoons she would watch on TV with her parents.

Turcan had never really thought of filmmaking as a calling until she traveled to Italy for a high school competition. She had learned about a competition asking students to film a movie showing off their school and, intrigued, submitted a film she had made in the ninth grade. After being accepted, she drove down in a school bus with her classmates to Italy, where the festival was being held. To her surprise, her film and school won third place.

“We came back, and I realized I want to do this for the rest of my life,” she said.

After high school, Turcan went to college at a Romanian film school. It was during her first year of college that she and her peers began work on a group project that would later provide inspiration for “Charon.”

After she graduated, Turcan began applying to MFA programs outside of Romania and was accepted to SU. It was then that she deferred for a year to raise funds, and eventually won the esteemed Fulbright Scholarship, which offers research and teaching opportunities to recent graduates and graduate students in more than 140 countries.

Before arriving at SU, Turcan began filming “Charon” in Romania. The documentary follows the story of a Roma family that takes care of a cemetery near her house. Turcan said she wanted to confront stereotypes and show a different side to the Roma community, which is otherwise known by the derogatory term “Gypsies.”

“Their life is very focused on family and the joy that it brings in. People see that as a stereotype … which is not true,” Turcan said. “They do have struggles in real life. There’s something about embracing their family — that I’ve never found anywhere else — that I miss.”

The emotions Turcan saw in Roma families translates into her work. She is driven by “humans and their problems,” saying that the feelings of anger make her want to be productive. Turcan added that when she’s concerned about something, she had to focus on it “because it stays with me all the time in my mind.”

For Turcan, filming lasted a year, and editing took another year. Although she began editing in the SU labs with the help of her professors, she eventually sent off her film to another editor to be finished.

Emily Vey Duke, who is an associate professor in the Department of Transmedia and was one of Turcan’s instructors last year, said Turcan is capable of very interesting work.

“Ioana is terrific,” Duke said in an email. “She is a warm and generous woman who is deeply committed to her vision as an artist and filmmaker.”

Owen Shapiro, co-founder and artistic director of the Syracuse International Film Festival, said VPA admitted Turcan and four other students out of a pool of 160 graduate applicants — demonstrating Turcan’s high caliber as a filmmaker.

“We think the quality is pretty high,” Shapiro said. “Ioana has so far lived up to that. She’s extremely talented. She has a very good and strong sense of herself as an artist.”

In the meantime, Turcan has been focusing on her studies and making films that deal with social and political issues. Her most recent film used immigration as a central theme.

Turcan said her future is uncertain, but she just knows that she always wants to do what she loves.

“I was always passionate about something for a year or two and then I’d just give it away,” Turcan said. “But film never bailed on me, my passion towards it. The fact that I was always interested and I could see it in a way, I think that’s what kept me with film. I want to do this for life.”

Published on January 24, 2016 at 9:15 pm

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