Parental Control
By David Schwartz
Tata
Dirs. Lina Vdovîi, Radu Ciorniciuc, Romania, Germany, The Netherlands, no distributor
Tata screens March 15 as part of First Look 2025 at Museum of the Moving Image.
When we see Lina Vdovîi in the opening scene of the documentary Tata, which she directed with her partner Radu Ciornicuic, she is a teenager in a decades-old VHS home movie, singing a song to her absent father about how much she misses him. Her cheery delivery feels forced. We learn through Lina’s present-day narration that the father, Pavel, left the family’s home in Moldova years ago to move to Italy, where he lives modestly as a migrant worker. “After he left, our home was finally peaceful,” Lina says, a line which, despite its matter-of-fact delivery, raises ominous questions. And we then learn that, like her father, Lina also moved out of Moldova, leaving at 18 to become an international journalist, and also to get far away from the pain of her troubled family life.
Cut to the present, and there is another video message, this time a cell-phone video from Pavel to Lina, showing ghastly bruises on his arms and chest. “See Lina, this is what my life is like in Italy now. Help me, please.” We already presume that Pavel was an abusive father; now we see that he is the victim of abuse himself. From Lina’s response to Pavel’s unsettling plea, another video will emerge; the feature-length film we are watching. Daring and sure-handed, Tata is a complex and candid hybrid of first-person documentary and investigative journalism.
With instincts that are part familial and part journalistic, Lina jumps into action after her father’s call. Radu films her packing her bags, reminding her to bring along two cameras and lapel microphones “just in case.” With a mix of determination and trepidation, Lina embarks on a car ride to Italy, with Radu. But is she traveling as a reporter, investigating the type of story her work has made her familiar with—the abusive treatment of immigrant laborers—or as a wounded daughter, looking for answers, and even catharsis, through an on-camera confrontation with her father about their buried past? The answer, of course, is both, and the film’s journalistic and personal missions become intertwined in fascinating ways. As Lina says at one point, “I realized I couldn’t change the world without changing my own family.”
What does the presence of the camera mean to Pavel and what does it mean to Lina? While breaking down the icy distance between father and daughter, it also creates a forum for Pavel to explain himself, to make excuses for, and justify his physically abusive behavior, but ultimately to work, in his own bull-headed style, towards some kind of genuine confession and apology. For Lina, the camera shifts the power dynamic in her favor, allowing her an upper hand as she finally confronts her father face-to-face about the anger and damage she has carried for decades. And as hard as it may be for Lina to trust that Pavel’s overtures are not just a new form of manipulation, the camera also lays the grounds for genuine collaboration between the two. Pavel allows Lina and Radu to equip him with a small hidden camera so that he can capture, as evidence, his boss’s violent behavior, providing him with the basis for a lawsuit. And Lina intuitively understands that the anguish the time with her father will cause her is part of the price for a film that exposes in stark terms the workings and results of toxic masculinity.
The film’s scope is not confined to the shifting dynamics between Lina and Pavel. One of its most psychologically rich moments happens offhandedly, when Lina and Radu are driving back to Romania after their first filming sessions with Pavel. Lina is ranting about how obsessively controlling Pavel was as a father; he would scrutinize the family phone bill, studying each call, and asking her to account for every minute. Radu jokes, “Sometimes you’re like that too.” But the joke cuts a little close to home. Lina is unsettled by the comparison to her father, and says defensively, “I’m not like that. If I was like that you wouldn’t be with me.” We then learn in voiceover, “the last person who told me I was like my father was my ex-husband. He left me after five months of marriage. It made me realize my father’s violence had always been a part of me.”
We later hear a story of abuse that has become part of the family lore, when Lina visits her paternal grandmother, who recounts how the grandmother’s young brother would often show up late to school because of farming chores. His teacher, in a burst of anger, beat the boy in class, tragically causing his death. Lina asked if her grandfather pressed charges against the teacher, and her grandmother said that he decided not to, reasoning, “I just buried my son. I don’t want to make the teacher’s sons lose their father.”
The most stoic victim of abuse in Tata is not Lina but her mother; we learn about her scarred past, living with an abusive stepfather after her father died. She explains to Lina that she stayed with Pavel all these years largely for Lina’s sake, “because I didn’t want you to have a stepfather, that’s why I never left him.” Everywhere Lina trains her camera, she finds evidence of psychic, and often physical abuse; the film shows the many ways that inertia sets in, allowing pain to congeal. Tata also searches for ways to end such patterns. Remarkably, the film maintains its incisive, clear-eyed focus even as Lina allows herself to be so vulnerable and unguarded; at times we see her almost regressing to childhood feelings as she faces her family demons. Yet she finds a way to a move towards healthy change as the film comes to an end. And in the process of making this revelatory film she found a way to not just bring family secrets to light but to break harmful cycles.