BUCHAREST. A WORLD BY ION BÂRLĂDEANU AND CARMEN LIDIA VIDU

Ion Bârlădeanu is already an iconic figure, known worldwide as a homeless art-world darling starring in Alexander Nanău’s documentary, The World According to Ion B. Carmen Lidia Vidu portrays him as a unique soul who ingenuously asserts his obsessions and favourite things found in Bucharest. Through editing she captures fragments of his digressive desires and memories, emphasizing his mercurial personality joined by a significant number of real and fictional figures which exist in his famous collages. She reaches his iconography following his artistic direction swamped in irony and social critique. The collages he puts together are his own films but Carmen succeeds to create a moving collage placing him in the center of his own picture.
The movie depicts an urban, cultural, emotional and fantastic Bucharest. It is composed of houses, buildings, parks but also of movie characters, a political and real world, of imagined-mainstream figures of today. Ion Bârlădeanu is a character in his own right: he has always dreamt of playing in the movies, of becoming a hero...The collages he creates are nothing more than his own movies, therefore he is a truly director; he imagines all kind of stories. The inherent dynamics of Ion Bârlădeanu’s collages is in tune with the director’s rhythm of her art video, providing a well-planned surprise. There is no contrast between the two visual approaches, on the contrary, they make the most of each other.