The Weight In My Backpack

As a kid, I used to be annoyed by my mum and her continuous pushing me to stay in front of her film camera. Sit here, hold that, grab the cat, move to the left… a bit to the right, yada yada yada…
As a single mom, she had found her muse and inspiration in this old camera and her lill’ one. Now that I look back and come to think of it, she was not just pushing buttons, she was a bit artsy and creative while doing it. But I was just a kid and didn’t get it. And there were years and years – of searching and exploring hobbies, passions, lost interests, and small nothings – to come until I truly got it.
I’m a ‘96 kid from Brasov – Romania. Moved to Cluj-Napoca in 2015 to start med-school.  Got caught up with learning and growing in medical knowledge but got lost somewhere along the way, had close to no more friends and no more hobbies but felt pretty content about what I had. Or at least that’s what I thought.

I was in my 3^rd-4^th year through university when I met some really nice people during the summertime of 2018. Amongst them was a really cool girl Ana (@ana.purcari) – my best friend nowadays – who had a film camera. She was occasionally pursuing us to come and go, wait, gather, sit and was basically reminding me of my mother except that she was about my age and well… she was cool. She had the energy, she had the friends, the hobbies… she had what I wanted. Instead of being jealous, I thought I also wanted and maybe even could get to be just a bit of that.
So there I was wishing to shoot my first film just because I also wanted to be cool… I know, superficial much, right? But that was just the start of it.
So I went back home asking my mom if I could borrow her Zenit 11 film camera that she hadn’t been using in years; same one she had been using throughout my whole childhood – the camera which she had bought at age 23 (4th year in med-school ‘89). Coincidence? Not so much