Who Is to Blame?

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Like Márta Mészáros, Florica Holban experienced losing her parents and institutionalization first-hand as a young child, which later triggered her long-term interest in the lives of the children growing up in state care. Holban’s Who Is to Blame? has something else in common with Mészáros’s Let All the Children Smile: they both include sequences filmed at the same orphanage in Bucharest (Orphanage No. 6)—Mészáros in the mid-50s, Holban a decade later. The two films also share a certain discretion regarding the role of the State, which assumed parental responsibility for children abandoned or separated from their parents. Here, both directors allow, albeit only briefly, the lonely and deprived children to appear as individuals with their own histories and traumas. Unlike Mészáros, however, Holban approaches her topic through a judicial lens: numerous sequences from her film were shot at the Tribunal, and the film credits a prosecutor as a consultant.