When filmmaker Alexandra ‘Liz’ Barnuti met and fell in love with fellow filmmaker Daniel Barnuti during a night out at their local cinema in Cluj-Napoca, marrying him two months later, it was the first step in a seven-year journey culminating in the world premiere of their feature-length documentary My Muslim Husband in this year’s RO Days competition at the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF).
Daniel was a convert to Islam and Liz believed that just being open to learning about a different culture would enable her new family to find happiness and harmony. But very quickly the young couple had to face prejudice and religious discrimination and needed to fight for their relationship even if it meant leaving behind their old selves or cutting off some people from their lives.
“My journey to Islam came before I met Liz when I was searching in my twenties for spirituality in Christianity and Buddhism and then finally Islam resonated with me around 2010,” Daniel recalls.
The film originated with Daniel. While living and working in Jordan he started gathering material for a film exploring an existence that seemed to hover between two worlds. “Whenever I came back to Romania, people kept asking me why I had converted to Islam and when I was in Jordan people also asked why I had converted,” he observes. “In addition, people in Romania often made some sick jokes about Muslims being a terrorist and having many wives.”
The project became more personal when Daniel met Liz and the challenges they were facing took centre stage. HBO Europe boarded during development.
Liz describes the film’s production process on My Muslim Husband as being very collaborative, “We split everything and are like one person since we consult each other about everything the whole time.”
They dealt with the challenges of making such a personal film by bringing on plenty of collaborators. “We were open to input from other people to give an outsider’s point of view,” Daniel explains.
Documentary producer-director Monica Lazurean-Gorgan served as a creative producer consultant and the couple worked with a team of five editors. The filmmakers realised they had plenty of material from shooting on location in Romania, Jordan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia over the course of 10 years.
“We had over 500 hours of material in fact, we stopped counting how much there was in total,” says Liz. “The editors spent almost three years working on it.”
Daniel adds: “It may look easy to make a film about yourself, but then you get to the editing stage and see that you have put yourself so much into the public eye and become really vulnerable.”
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