Dani Saracut’s feature documentary Blue Planet follows five citizens of Cluj-Napoca - two taxi drivers, a baker, a decorator and a nurse - whose greatest aspiration is to reunite their rock band Dio Family for the recording of the title track ’Blue Planet’.
“It was a dream to play as a band when they were young and Romania was still under the Ceaucescu regime,” says the director and Cluj-Napoca native. “They are still fighting to make music as a way of escaping from the stress of daily life.”
The film is now screening in this year’s RO Days feature competition at the Transilvania International Film Festival this week.
The seeds to what is Saracut’s first feature-length film were sown when one of the taxi drivers, an old friend of his father’s and someone he has known since childhood, called by at his house in early 2019.
“He came by with his guitar and asked if I could help him out by making a music video of the band’s first musical composition,” he recalls. “I was thinking that this might be a good chance to go deeper and see if there would be scope for a film. I then started spending more time with the five and getting to know them better and that’s how the filming started.”
Production began in October 2019 on the independent production which was financed through Saracut’s own resources and fellow producer Eugen Kelemen, with the final stage of editing and colour correction completed in May.
Kelemen, whose credits as a film editor include Paul Negoescu’s recent award-winning feature Men Of Deeds and Tudor Giurgiu’s European Film Award-winning short Superman, Spiderman, Or Batman, was also the editor for Blue Planet and secured Avanpost as the film’s partner for the postproduction.
“It was like a one-man show during the filming,” says Saracut who cites documentary filmmakers such as the Maysles brothers with their Direct Cinema technique and Michael Moore, as well as UK director Sacha Gervasi’s rockumentary about the Canadian heavy metal band Anvil, Anvil!: The Story of Anvil, as important reference points for his own approach to documentary filmmaking.
“I directed, did the camerawork and the sound during the film and then made the selection of scenes during the editing with Eugen - I was really involved at every stage,” he explains.
The filmmaker is now exploring the potential for a new film project centred on a female driftpilot in the world of motor sports.
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