Be(you)tiful

Youth is undecided, contradictory, pensive and visionary. It is yearning after the intangible. Diana Stefanescu’s short film reaches out just for that: the intangible.

Be(you)tiful is about growing conscience about oneself as well as it is about the duplicatory nature of our human spirit. And when has that ever been better defined than during our younger years when spirit is unconstrained and aching to fly free?

The lyrical monologue bones up a series of ideological concepts and ideals forged by the young heart eternally fascinated by contrasts, the underplayed dimensions of reality and perfection. For the protagonist of Be(you)tiful life is yet a quest for self discovery, it is diving amid contradictions, it is fighting against rules and breaking free of boundaries. It is a war between reason and emotion, it is instinct against consciousness.

The individual imprisoned by convention and ignorance urges the true self to emerge raw and unrestrained. Amid disregard and incomprehension the individual is left to live their drama in solitude and is doomed to remain forever misunderstood and secret.

Love is the game played by the unleashed self in order to isolate itself from the outside; it is the vaccine against the ordinary and the custom. ‘Be yourself! It’s beautiful!’ seems to be the moral of Diana Stefanescu’s film. Beauty is something you acknowledge, is something you learn, something you experience and eventually resign to. Poetry is a way of living in Be(you)tiful. Beauty is a free manifestation of existence in its rawest state. It is physically untouchable and yet sensorially tangible.

Diana Stefanescu’s film is a personal search, the diary of a quest and nevertheless a testimony of freedom. Personal convictions and experiences blend into a delirious mix, a journey to a place we’ve been all initiated in but we’ve now lost. This is a nostalgic portrait of Youth, a realm forever trapped in time, conserved and inaccessible to adulthood. The place where everything is possible and permitted and where the self doesn’t get judged for what who they are.

Recalling, pleasantly haunting and hypnotic.