Acasa, My Home

Rică, like Acasă, My Home itself, meditates on how we define a life worth choosing.

It's a remarkable piece of documentary access.

It's a very empathetic portrait, but it also shows the complexity of this family... I think it's most poignant when it focuses on the children.

Needless to say, the point of Ciorniciuc's immersive, lively, warm and heartbreaking film is not to see the Enaches in the park as total paradise and their stab at urban living as some terrible detour into restrictiveness.

While the meandering sensibility of "Acasa, My Home" makes it a tough sit at times, the spell it casts through its all-access dive into subterranean life brought to the surface forms a compelling addition to one of international cinema's deepest.

The secret of this beautiful, bittersweet film about a group of people like no other is that, in the end, it's all so shockingly relatable.

Acasa is fascinating and complicated, lyrical and messy; we sympathize with the subjects while also feeling society's spasm of impatience with them.

This intimate documentary powerfully asks the question 'which of the places we live is destined to be remembered as home?'

Acasa conceals multitudes within its deceptively simple story about real people confronting inexorable change. It's the first great documentary of 2021.

It ruminates powerfully on the meaning of freedom, positing that our only chance at control may be a place far, far away from civilization, a place where the reeds sway gently and the fish are plenty.