“As soon as I finished college I was trying to round up my earnings by making an appearance. In 1971 I was 25 years old when director Iulian Mihu shot “Felix and Otilia”, a screenplay based on the famous novel “Otilia’s Enygma” by George Călinescu, at Casa de Filme 1. In one of the scenes, where the characters talk over a cup of coffee, the director was very unhappy with the sugar bowl that the set designer had at his disposal, because they didn’t match the tablecloth chromatically. I took heart and dared to tell her I had just the item she needed. It was a Waldershof Bavaria silver overlay porcelain sugar bowl, made in the late 1920’s, that I received as a gift from my neighbor Frau Grette. Frau Grette had come with her husband, a member of the German Military Mission in Romania during World War II. When in 1944 Romania turned against Germany her husband was killed and she could not go back to Germany. She stayed in Romania, in Curtea de Arges, where I am from, and became a German teacher. She married two more times, the last of her husbands was a former political prisoner.
Moving on to the Sugar Bowl, it was touching for me to recognize it from the film Felix and Otilia, based on the novel “Otilia’s Enygma” by George Călinescu, that we studied as a mandatory novel in the highschool curriculum. The object contains a huge part of history in itself, the presence on set adding a new layer of in this palimpsest of memories. As in the cae of Cristian Nemescu’s camera, it should be a starting point for the younger generation to look for the movie and open a window towards understanding the evolution of Romanian Cinematography – Sabina Ulubeanu, curator