Tom Wilson, UK
Born in Britain, Tom Wilson moved
to Romania in 2002, after finishing university:
Roxana Vasile, 21.05.2015, 14:08
Born in Britain, Tom Wilson moved
to Romania in 2002, after finishing university:
It was 1999
when I first came to Romania and I was just about to start university. Me and a
friend decided that we do a very low-budget trip around Eastern Europe. (…)
Romania back then! (..) It was crazy. Crazy in an amazing way. For me, coming
from the very organised, rigid society of England and to come to Romania you
felt a real kind of sense of freedom in a positive way. Everything was all so
chaotic. You could tell that this was a society that was recovering from a
revolution. But it was brilliant. Everyone I met was so nice. We went to Cabana
Babele, we hitchhiked up to Cota 2000, which is kind of a hotel high way up the
mountain and just the stories people were telling us about the mafia, the
government, bears, wolves, corruption, dodgy policemen, people working abroad…
It was amazing. For me it was like a fairytale, Balkan fantasy world. I’d never
experienced anything like it and I thought it was amazing. So we were in Cabane
Babele, we got caught in a thunder storm, we had to take shelter and I met a
Romanian artist, Vlad Nanca, who still is a very well-known contemporary
Romanian artist, and we made very good friends and he invited me back. I came
back in the year 2000 and I DJ-ed at the seaside at 2 Mai and I never lost the
connection. I met a really good group of friends, I started seeing a Romanian
girl, I had a Romanian girlfriend, and so from 1999 until 2002 I was studying
at University and I was coming back every holiday whenever I could, to meet
people. I think I have really happy memories of Romania at that time. Because
now Romania is a developed country, it’s a European country, it’s in the
European Union. Back then it felt like a kind of post-Soviet,
post-revolutionary crazy place to be in and I loved that. I liked feeling that
I was in this kind of forgotten part of the world.
Tom could never imagine himself working 9 to 5 in a bank
in London, so when he came to Bucharest, he did many different freelance jobs:
he worked as a journalist, even collaborating for a while with Radio Romania
International, as a DJ, and, since more recently, as a film director. He now
makes commercials for international brands. As a film maker, Tom Wilson is best
known in Romania for a documentary first screened at the Transylvania
International Film Festival in 2013. One year later, he won an important
national film award, the Gopo award for best documentary. Tom Wilson:
It’s called The Bucharest Experiment and
it’s partly fictional partly true so you have to watch the film to find out
what parts are fictional and what parts are true because the fiction is there
for a purpose. I used a fictional device to make a point about modern Romanian
society. I made it on nothing. I spent 250 euros making this film and a lot of
time and if you compare that to the budgets of even a small independent film is
going to cost you tens of thousands of euros. Most of the Romanian films
nowadays cost half a million euros easily, so for me to be able to make a film
for 250 euros was fantastic. It was an investment of a lot of time and a lot of
energy, not just on my half, as well as on the half of the ordinary people that
are in it because the ‘actors’ weren’t actors, they were ordinary people. (…)
I’m an outsider in the film world, I’m not connected to all the big producers
and the production houses, so I’m really grateful to all the people that helped
me and that gave me advice, told me where to go, which festivals to apply to.
A promoter of
Romanian arts abroad with three projects financed by the Romanian Cultural
Institute, Tom Wilson also contributed to a directory entitled 100 to Watch,
a listing of the 100 most talented artists in Romania. Having lived here for so
long, Tom Wilson says Romania is by no means an idyllic country. Some of the
things he dislikes most include the Bucharest traffic, the homeless dogs,
corruption and some people’s racism about the gypsy and foreigners. He says,
however, that Romanians do not have such a negative image in Britain as we
might think:
I think,
actually, if you go there, Romanians have quite a good image in Britain. Most
of what you see and hear is created by the media because you have very
unpleasant right-wing newspapers like The Daily Mail whose job it is to create
hatred among people and to stir up this distrust of immigrants because it fits
their political agenda, and that’s horrible. (…) If you actually go to England
and talk to people, I would say they’re not pro-Romanian, they’re indifferent.
Britain is a multicultural society, London is the most multicultural city in
the world from what I’ve seen and you have people from all over the world. (..)
When you actually go to England as a Romanian people just treat you as a normal
human being, that’s what I would like to think. (…) I’d like to think that
people treat Romanians as they would treat any other European citizen.
