3 Days in September, the new film by Tudor Giurgiu, begins with what seems like a simple situation: one evening, a woman learns something that shakes her relationship and forces her off a familiar path. But the moment Bianca (Andreea Vasile) starts running, her flight becomes more than a reaction to shock—it becomes the beginning of a breakaway. The audience follows her almost in real time, in a single continuous take that transforms Eforie Sud into a landscape of chaos, strange encounters, and truths that emerge before they can even be put into words.
Speaking to AperiTIFF, Tudor Giurgiu says the project began with a desire to tell a story centered on a female character, as well as a fascination with a very specific world—slightly worn-down, tangible, and difficult to package into tourist-friendly clichés. Eforie Sud, especially at the end of the season, has, in his words, “a broad, faded charm, the feeling of a place that once used to be something else.” It is neither Mamaia Nord, with its cosmopolitan vibe, nor Vama Veche, with its already mythologized coolness. Instead, it is a seaside resort populated by eccentric piano players, widows, golf-cart drivers, weddings, buses converted into temporary lodgings, and people who seem to have stepped out of another era. “It’s a world you can hardly imagine—you don’t even know it exists.” This very world gives the film its grounding, anchoring it in a concrete yet unsettling reality.
The construction of the film, however, was far from improvised. Giurgiu explains that the original plan involved a crew of 30–40 people, but the demands of extras, sound recording, camera movement, and background action eventually expanded the team to around 60.
“There were 17 lavalier microphones, multiple frequency channels, actors appearing in one location and then needing to be rushed elsewhere, minibuses transporting extras from point to point while the camera could never stop rolling.”
One take, for example, was ruined when actress Emilia Popescu, positioned inside a hotel with thick walls, lost signal just as she was supposed to answer a video call. In a film like this, chance must feel alive, yet remain controlled down to the second.
This is where the actors became crucial. Giurgiu speaks of “autonomous actors,” without whom such a project would have been impossible. In a one-take film, a director no longer has the luxury of fixing problems in the editing room. Rehearsals establish movement, rhythm, and cues, but once the camera starts rolling, the actors are left alone with the truth of the moment.
For AperiTIFF, Andreea Vasile passionately describes Bianca’s journey through this very impossibility of immediately rationalizing what is happening to her. Breakaways, she says, often begin before they can be named. Bianca has no plan and no time to think; her actions are driven by emotion and instinct. “The analysis comes later,” the actress explains. During the night itself, truth resides in hurried, imperfect, chaotic, and unfiltered reactions.
That is why Bianca does not move neatly through stages of shock, anger, shame, confusion, or liberation. They all arrive at once. For Vasile, the challenge was not to construct clearly visible psychological milestones, but to avoid beautifying anything—to refrain from performing conclusions or explanations. Regardless of lenses, framing, or technical complications, the camera captures only one thing: truth. And in 3 Days in September, truth is not something fixed. It shifts alongside Bianca, changing with every person she meets and every place she passes through.
The screenplay, written by Tudor Giurgiu, Conrad Mericoffer, and Radu Grigore, had to create precisely this paradoxical sensation: chaos with structure.
Also speaking to AperiTIFF, Mericoffer emphasizes how difficult it is to portray chaos when filming in a continuous flow. Situations therefore had to be built as simply as possible, and adjustments were made during takes to streamline Bianca’s route. The people she encounters along the way feel familiar yet slightly absurd, as if everyday reality were being subtly put to the test.
Victor, played by Emilian Oprea, triggers the evening’s collapse. The actor says he does not absolve his character—“he is guilty, yes”—but notes that the story moves beyond blame and instead explores what happens after our mental projections fall apart. For Oprea, 3 Days in September is about “hard truth,” about what lies beyond fear and imagination, but also about the power to redirect a painful life path.
Perhaps this is where the film derives its strength—not from grand historical or social stakes, but from an intimate moment that, once opened, allows an entire world to enter.
Giurgiu says he was interested in a simple question: “Where do you go from here?” The screenplay therefore rejects clear-cut solutions, leaving Bianca’s separation suspended somewhere between hurt and the possibility of a freedom she herself cannot yet name.
Behind this apparent lightness lies a project built with rigor, risk, and curiosity—one deeply rooted in the TIFF family, born out of the quarter-century during which the festival has gathered people, energies, and friendships that transcend the event itself. It became a form of freedom and a collective experience, almost like a creative camp by the sea.
Not by chance, Giurgiu describes the project as a space where collaborators from different generations and backgrounds were invited to discover one another directly through the work, without the safety net of a proven formula. Precisely because it does not conform to the expected blueprint of a “major work,” 3 Days in September finds its energy elsewhere: in the body of an actress carrying the film, in the invisible machinery of the crew, in a forgotten seaside town that becomes a character in its own right, and in that night when Bianca, as she puts it, “runs into all the crazies”—perhaps because the world itself has suddenly begun to look different.