Nanu Tudor (Olga Lucovnicova, 2020)

Rhythms of Silence

Olga Lucovnicova’s My Uncle Tudor (2020)

essay by

01.07.2026

A lace curtain flits in the breeze, revealing an out-of-focus figure in the background. The eponymous uncle in Olga Lucovnicova’s film Nanu Tudor is often blurry or framed behind translucent fabric, observed silently at a remove. Personal documentaries frequently deploy poor visibility to protect family members from the camera’s extractive gaze. Yet Lucovnicova’s cold distance signals the opposite: she is protecting herself from him.

Returning to her great-grandparents’ home in Moldova, where her uncle sexually abused her when she was nine years old, Lucovnicova films the site of her childhood trauma with a detached ambivalence. A shot of the house’s sunlit exterior is bookended by glimpses of uncle Tudor, contesting the idyllic quality of its rural setting. “So fresh, so green,” enthuses her mother, “it’s my childhood and my youth,” Lucovnicova’s lens might capture this nostalgia, but it does not endorse the sentiment.

Inside the home, the camera pans slowly over old family photographs as the women of the family sort through them, reminiscing about days gone by. Photography’s indexical bond to reality suggests an alluring relationship to truth, a crutch for memory, yet in Lucovnicova’s autobiographical film, the smiling, static figures become indecipherable. Unreliable documents of an irretrievable past, the photos magnify the disjunction between the nostalgia of her family members and the weight of what is unsaid, swept under the thick, woven carpets that line the family home.

Filmmaking, then, is an attempt to puncture the oppressive silence. “Don’t you remember anything bad from my childhood?” Lucovnicova asks her uncle in a calm, steady tone. Her questions are oblique at first, as if giving him the opportunity to confess. But as the conversation unfurls, the horrific extent of his indifference and lack of remorse is laid bare.

My Uncle Tudor

Olga Lucovnicova, Belgium, Portugal, Hungary, Moldova, 2020, 20’

After twenty years of silence, filmmaker Olga Lucovnicova returns to her great-grandparents’ home, where she endured traumatic experiences that left a lasting impression on her memory.

Emily Jisoo Bowles

We are denied the voyeurism of watching the confrontation. Instead, the elliptical dialogue is layered over interior shots of the house. The handheld camera glides over decades of accumulated clutter and bric-a-brac, tracing cracks in the wall and spiders spinning webs in darkened corners, as the two recount the events that took place twenty years prior. The bifurcation of sound and image creates an irreconcilable gap between the visual signifiers of domestic banality and the trauma unearthed by the voiceover, a twisting of familiarity into danger that echoes the statistics the film ends on: “90% of [childhood abuse] victims know their perpetrator.”

There is no evidence to be discovered in the home’s dusty crevices, and indeed, uncle Tudor does not outright deny his abuse so much as downplay it. Rather than proving what happened, the images are a testament to what has been buried, foregrounding the silence that obfuscates Lucovnicova’s past. Her camera floats through rooms like a spectral presence, arriving at momentary standstills to rest its gaze on a family member sleeping or praying. She peers at them from behind door frames and curtains, almost like a child searching for a trustworthy confidant but hesitating to approach. At times, she films her family head-on, faces jarringly legible in close-ups, only to distort them into out-of-focus, impenetrable surfaces. There is no closure or catharsis within these inscrutable images; even the traces of familial warmth at the dinner table are overshadowed by an alienating distance.

Documentary cinema is no stranger to staging discomfort. Films such as The Act of Killing (2012) probe the uneasy dynamics between victim and perpetrator, where the performativity of filmmaking can unveil new truths beyond the regime of the factual. Lucovnicova does not compromise on discomfort, yet refuses to distill her trauma down to a spectacle of confrontation. If the camera deceives and the family archive cannot be trusted, her subjectivity and agency instead manifest through what she chooses not to show. She doesn’t simply rupture the silence, but weaves its rhythms into a tapestry of absence and refusal.

Bio Emily Jisoo Bowles

Emily Jisoo Bowles is a British-Korean writer, translator, and film programmer based in London. She has curated short-film programs for the Queer East Festival and is currently running a community cinema club called Jjambbong Film, which focuses on lesser-seen Asian films.