THE NIGHT PRACTICE

Short Talk with Andrei Giurgea (cast)

Romania / 2023 / 16’

BEST STUDENT FICTION FILM Category

21st IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: The new goalkeeper in a junior soccer team is greeted with hostility by the other boys. Robert, the only friendly teammate, develops an obsession with him.

Biography: Bogdan Alecsandru is a Bucharest based filmmaker. After graduating the BA in Film and Television Directing at UNATC "I. L. Caragiale", he continued his studies with a MA in Film Directing. His short films have been screened in festivals such as TIFF Romania, Filmschool Fest Munich and RiverRun IFF. 'The Night Practice' was nominated for Best Romanian Short Film at the Gopo Awards. He explores queer storylines and the thematic fusion between anxiety and intimacy in fiction film.

Bogdan Alecsandru, director

In The Palace: As the person who played the main character in this movie, how was it for you playing such a role, do you have experience playing something similar before and how challenging was it for you?

Andrei Giurgea (cast): I do not have much of an experience as an actor, however I did acting in High School. I studied directing when the film happened. Someone told the director of “The Night Practice” about me and the director said that I kind of have the face of someone who looks like a vampire. So, I took the role and he asked me to audition and I did. The funny story is that a couple of days before this happened, the other actor who played the goalkeeper, who is a very good friend of mine, was like “Hey, can you help me learn a couple of lines for this audition I have?”. So, I read exactly the part that later I auditioned for.  I was so happy to play again with my friend by my side, because we played together in high school and the fact that he was there was very accommodating. Having to portray this kind of relationship would have been a lot harder, if I did not know him, a  lot harder to open up and be relaxed.

 
 
In The Palace: And how does this movie affect your relationship with him?

Andrei Giurgea: Not much, it is for the art and we are used to being more private in front of the camera so it was not really anything life changing in what we did. We also got very close with the director, he rehearsed with us a lot, talked with us a lot about the characters and how we are supposed to play them. This whole process kind of started relieving the pressure that we had in order to do this role.

In The Palace: If you had to explain it to the audience , how would you describe the main topic in the film?

Andrei Giurgea: The main topic is the vampire part, which is not in the trailer. A very strong point of Bogdan was that vampirism is something about the things that you repressed, which is a theme in many movies about vampires and in “The Night Practice” is the same. It is about a relationship between two boys in an environment that does not really promote those types of relationships. The film is about repressing and hiding things that are part of you from other people and how at one point they start bubbling and boiling until they come out. It is called “The Night Practice”, because the main characters tend to meet at night.

In The Palace: So this obsession is why the main character ends up biting the goalkeeper,  they have been hiding their real selves for so long, that it goes to a limit?

Andrei Giurgea: First it took me a while to understand that the bite is supposed to be vampire related, because Bogdan never talked about “ You are a vampire”, he told us about the relationship and things like that. At first, I thought it was just something like my character is very kinky, but, anyway, he has this urge and attraction to boys that he hides. The vampirism gets kind of a hint for the other boys. The shaming that my character goes through is sort of similar to probably what you will experience in a more hateful environment if you show signs, more related to homosexuality. 

Author's view (Petar Penev):

Putting in front the idea of a man outside his element in a new and unfamiliar environment ‘The Night Practice’ by Bogdan Alecsandru asks an interesting question – How far is one actually willing to go in order to find a connection? Subsequently – How far would one go in order to be that connection for someone else?
 
For its greater part the film is slow and gentle, especially for a film about a group of boy, football players at that. Acting is put on the forefront as the characters have to really nail complex and contradictory emotional pallets. It is the essential part of what helps the film slowly but patiently build tension and suspense culminating in a gory and violent yet extremely passionate climax calling back to the romance-filled body horror of Julia Ducournau.
 
As rarely anything in life is really black and white the film leaves just enough questions for the audience to chew on after the credits row – How does violence come about? How do our surroundings impact this? What do we do about it?