"My father once told me the immigrant’s nightmare. It’s when you dream you return to the country you fled from but you can never leave again. My father said, ‘If you have this nightmare, you’ve finally arrive’. My father had that nightmare. I never had it. Maybe it’s because I never fled from Romania. I was fled.”

In Anatomy of a Departure, director Oliver Tataru retraces the steps of his family’s flight from Romania at the end of the 1980s, and the collision of their individual memories about the country more than twenty years later. On one side is the parents’ bleak vision of a world of sensory and emotional deprivation, of a Romania brought to its knees by an oppressive system. On the other side is the romanticized vision of a country of teenage friendships and enthusiasms, a space of almost paradisiac, forever irrecoverable family happiness. In between them are all the things that remained unsaid between the three when a huge decision was upon them. "Were we supposed to burden you with such a big secret? In Romania you simply didn’t ask your children such things. We didn’t have those concepts like they have here: ‘A child is a small adult. Let’s talk about everything, let’s set up a roundtable, a workshop or something’…".

Parents always know best. And children rarely forgive them for that.