Gabor Tarko
Director of Photography Feature films
THE PALE LIGHT OF SORROW – REMAKE SUMMARY
1980 saw the release of the classic Romanian film The Pale Light of Sorrow, the story of life in a traditional Romanian village on the eve of World War I. Realistic and magical, tragic and absurdly humoristic, The Pale Light of Sorrow became a benchmark of Romanian cinema and was awarded the Special Diploma of the 1981 Moscow International Film Festival.
In April of 2008, The Pale Light of Sorrow was featured at the Lincoln Centre in New York as the opening film for the Romania Cinema Then and Now film festival. It was referred to as ‘One of the towering achievements of Romanian cinema.’
Later that year the film was also featured at the Romanian Cinema Rising film festival at the Gene Siskel Film Centre in Chicago in May of 2008.
The time has come to bring this timeless classic to the world. With co-operation and support from Dan Pita, one of Romania’s more renowned and prolific directors as well as the head of the Centre for National Cinema in Romania, plans are underway to create an English re-make of The Pale Light of Sorrow to be shot by the film’s original director of photography Gabor Tarko and Canadian director David Popescu.
At the start of WWI, a well educated couple move from the capital of Bucharest to a remote Romanian village deep in the haunting Transylvanian mountains to teach at the newly built school. Their young son Georghe bright, observant and poetic, learns about the absurdity of life, it’s beauty and tragedy through the intertwined lives, and deaths of the simple folk of the village.
From his first day Georghe longs to leave the village, to become educated and ultimately make his way to the new world. There is an unspoken bond between himself and Lina, a beautiful young woman of the village who has also outgrown her humble surroundings and dreams to leave but unlike Georghe, has no means to do so. Separately they are drawn to the romance of the train that passes through their village, the only connection to the outside world.
Lina is persued by Fane, a strong young man of the village, though Lina’s boredom makes their courtship distant and aloof. Only when Fane is sent off to war does she realize what she has lost. She is vulnerable and with nothing else in her life she seeks refuge in the arms of the promiscuous young priest, a fate from which she can never return.
The story of Georghe rings true to Mr. Tarko and Mr. Popescu on personal levels. Mr. Tarko left his small Romanian town to attend film school in the capital of Bucharest. Upon graduation he had the rare distinction of being thrust immediately into the feature film world, shooting four pictures by the young age of 25. He, like the young Georghe in the film, dreamt of life in the new world and fled the Communist state to find his fortune in New York.
For Popescu the story has close family roots as well. At the turn of the last century his great grandfather left a small, remote village in the Transylvanian mountains to make the long trek to Canada in order to try and secure a more prosperous future for himself and his descendants. Over 100 years later Popescu returned to Transylvania to film in the same mountains.
Though the setting and the time frame of the film are very specific, the themes, the characters and the emotions are universal.
What is remarkable about this story is that no matter who you are or where you are from you recognise these characters. We all know an old hypochondriac grandmother, we know the dumbest guy in town who somehow makes the most money, we have seen the smart young kid who is destined to improve his station in life without fail, we have seen the person who has everything going for them stuck in a rut that they can’t escape. We all know the wife of a businessman who lets meagre local success go to her head, we know of people who preach goodness and practice evil, we know people who have slowly gone mad over time and left them to their own devices, too embarrassed to say anything.
No matter who we are, where we live or in what era, we are these same characters, we have the same wants, we go through the same joys and tragedies. What makes this film important is that even though it is a story that takes place almost one hundred years ago, in a remote part of a remote part of the world, and that it was made 30 years ago in a wildly different social and political climate, anyone can identify with the story and see their own lives up there on the screen.
There is something comforting and delightfully tragic that we are all the same, that our own personal stories have played out long before us and will do so long after we are gone.
Long before the explosion of social phenomena entertainment such as The Office, Arrested Development and Seinfield, The Pale Light of Sorrow was exploring social interaction on all levels, dry understated absurdity, tragedy, hope, ennui, personality types and the politics of human interaction.
The film’s recognition in 2008 shows that, the film is still vital, important and most of all entertaining. An English re-make, sympathetic in its approach and with a modern aesthetic, its filmmakers will bring this story onto the world stage so that it can be appreciated and enjoyed by everyone.