Maia – Portrait with Hands UK premiere + Artist Q&A - Fashion in Film Festival 2025
Running time: 90 mins
Genre:
Release Date: 29/05/2025
In her captivating film, artist Alexandra Gulea knits together the life of her grandmother Maia (1905-1999) with the history of the Aromanians, a Balkan ethnic group subjected to displacement and cultural suppression during early 20th-century nationalist conflicts. Through a collage of carefully composed cinematic tableaux, archival footage, photographs, puppetry, drawings, and performative ‘re-incarnations,’ the film results in an extraordinarily layered portrait that is both deeply personal and historical. Dress emerges as one of Gulea’s central motifs. A red bridal gown with a five-meter train represents Maia's resistance to marriage customarily arranged by Aromanian women and translucent men's suits that move in the wind evoke the death by hanging of Gulea’s great-grandfather and other relatives. Elsewhere, an inherited velvet dress is seen drifting through the landscapes the Aromanians once traversed from the Black Sea to Bucharest. As Gulea notes: ‘The velvet dress is borne like a spectre. The landscapes in the film, in all their vastness and diversity, bear witness to Maia’s passage through these lands. Waters, mountains, trees – all have known her, all have absorbed her suffering.’
Romania, 2024, Dir. Alexandra Gulea, 90min, Romanian & Aromanian with English subtitles
About the festival:
Fashion in Film Festival 2025 presents GROUNDED, a major UK-wide season exploring the relationship between fashion and nature through the lens of cinema. Spanning the late 19th century to present day, the programme examines fashion’s role as simultaneously a barrier and a connecting tissue between humans and the natural world. With over 80 titles including rare screenings and UK premieres, GROUNDED presents diverse narratives addressing ecological and geopolitical concerns while exploring imaginative spaces of poetry, comedy, beauty, joy, horror, and transgression. fashioninfilm.com
