Acasă, My Home | Telescope Film
Acasă, My Home

Acasă, My Home (Acasă)

Critic Rating

(read reviews)

User Rating

  • Romania,
  • Germany
  • 2020
  • · 86m

Director Radu Ciorniciuc
Genre Documentary

At an abandoned water reservoir, the Enache family lives in harmony with nature. When the area is transformed into a public park, however, they are forced to move to the city. As the family struggles with their new lifestyle, they question their place in the world and their future.

Stream Acasă, My Home

What are critics saying?

91

Original-Cin by Linda Barnard

Despite the relationship he had with the Enaches, Ciorniciuc sticks to his roots as an investigative journalist and makes no judgements. He avoids giving easy answers.

90

The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden

Lyrical and provocative, Acasa, My Home brings an intimate slant to age-old questions about the value of conformity, the pleasures and challenges of the natural world versus the comforts and distractions of modernity, and the amorphous but essential matter of what constitutes a good life. And it does so with laudable concision.

90

Film Threat

Radu Ciorniciuc’s Acasa, My Home, is a heart-rending documentary with investigative undertones.

90

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

Needless to say, the point of Ciorniciuc’s immersive, lively, warm and heartbreaking film is not to see the Enaches in the park as total paradise and their stab at urban living as some terrible detour into restrictiveness. Acasă, My Home is much more complicated, as any thorough portrait of our modern world is when progress is a balance between old and new ways and people like the Enaches find their notions of survival and independence challenged.

90

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

It’s both intimate and analytical, a sensitive portrait of real people undergoing enormous change and a meditation on what that change might mean. It taps into something primal in the human condition, a basic conflict between the desire for freedom and the tendency toward organization — an argument, finally, about the meaning of home.

90

New York Magazine (Vulture) by Bilge Ebiri

The secret of this beautiful, bittersweet film about a group of people like no other is that, in the end, it’s all so shockingly relatable.

90

Film Threat

Radu Ciorniciuc’s Acasa, My Home, is a heart-rending documentary with investigative undertones.

89

Austin Chronicle by Selome Hailu

Rică, like Acasă, My Home itself, meditates on how we define a life worth choosing.

83

The Film Stage by Jordan Raup

With an immersive vérité touch, Acasă, My Home vividly captures living on the margins of society––whether it’s actually off the grid or being thrown into a system not of your choosing.

80

Screen Daily by Tim Grierson

Ciorniciuc’s journalistic background infuses the film with rigour and forward propulsion so that a narrative spine begins to develop. And he does a fine job contrasting the family’s reality with the puffed-up words from politicians and community leaders, who see the Bucharest Delta as merely an opportunity for an urban park.

80

The Guardian by Phil Hoad

Ciorniciuc and his co-writer Lina Vdovîi, in allowing events to unfold slowly in front of the camera, have created a beautifully measured portrait of an amazingly resonant topic.

75

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

It’s a fascinating peek into another way of living, urban Roma (“Gypsies”) who refuse to assimilate or accommodate, to look backward even as they’re steadfastly refusing to plan ahead.

75

Slant Magazine by Diego Semerene

The film is at its most moving when it lingers on the face of children who are impotent to return to the world they used to call home.

70

Variety by Jessica Kiang

Balance and objectivity are laudable instincts, but they can put the film at a slightly frustrating remove.

67

IndieWire by Ryan Lattanzio

While the meandering sensibility of Acasa, My Home makes it a tough sit at times, the spell it casts through its all-access dive into subterranean life brought to the surface forms a compelling addition to one of international cinema’s deepest, and ever-growing, pockets.