Andrei Morari, Dima, Exhibition

Soviet cinema of the early twentieth century developed one of the most ambitious theories of documentary filmmaking. Vertov believed the camera to be a device “more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaotic visual phenomena that fill space” — not simply recording reality, but uncovering it. Unscripted shots, non-professional subjects, the candid camera — these were tools of truth-telling, bound to a political purpose. “Not candid shooting for its own sake,” Vertov wrote, “but in order to show people without a mask, without makeup, to catch them with the eye of the camera in a moment of non-acting.” The image was meant to serve a historical argument. Postmodern criticism challenged this idea, showing that every image is shaped by who makes it — their background, beliefs, and the social conditions they inhabit. Pasolini, in “The Cinema of Poetry,” put it plainly: “the spontaneous choice of images by the director is inevitably determined by his ideological and poetic vision of the world at that moment.” What appears on screen is not a window onto reality, but a particular way of seeing it.
This exhibition is the result of an experiment situated between these two ideas. Dima was made using methods borrowed from the early avant-garde — no script, no staging, no editing — but without the certainty that drove them. The work claims no special access to truth and offers no political message. Instead, it accepts that what it shows is inseparable from the experience, relationships, and circumstances of the person who made it. Perhaps this honesty is what allows the documentary approach to remain meaningful today. Observation without an agenda still records — exclusion, silence, inequality. Reality, it seems, speaks for itself. The language of cinema keeps changing. “Cinema is not the reflection of reality,” Godard wrote, “but the reality of the reflection” — a reminder that the search for new forms is always also a search for new ways to see. For me, this experiment is an attempt to turn the invisible, the hidden, the dismissed sides of life into something worth looking at: work that might prompt reflection, and perhaps a little more openness toward those who rarely get to speak.

(Andrei Morari, 21 march 2026)

Andrei Morari, 25 years old, student of the Multimedia Faculty at the Academy of Music, Theatre, and Fine Arts in Chișinău; member of the publishing cooperative Iskra and of the collective 3-rd Space Studio at the cultural center Zemstvo Museum. With an extensive experience in cultural work, his areas of interest include samizdat, experimental music, cinema, and photography. As a student in the Film and Television Directing program, Andrei completed several projects that serve as studies of certain social groups represented in the Republic of Moldova.

Images: Andrei Morari, Dima, 2026