Acasa, My Home

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

It's a remarkable piece of documentary access.

It's a very empathetic portrait, but it also shows the complexity of this family... I think it's most poignant when it focuses on the children.

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.

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.

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.

Strong camera work follows a family from paradise to the promise, as yet unfulfilled, of urban upward mobility.

Ciorniciuc extractsa seamless narrative with his compelling cinema verite style, yet he fails to fully explore the toxic patriarch at the story's heart.

At only 86 minutes, Ciorniciuc and editor Andrei Gorgan rarely allow their story to lag, although it's lack of any big climaxes mean broader appeal like that attained by Collective is harder to figure.

Acasa is fascinating and complicated, lyrical and messy; we sympathize with the subjects while also feeling society's spasm of impatience with them.