At the 28th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, the Romanian film editor Dana Bunescu was a member of the International Jury, which awarded the festival’s main prize on March 15, 2026. She received a Silver Bear at the Berlinale in 2017 for her editing of Ana, Mon Amour (directed by Călin Peter Netzer). She has worked as a sound engineer and sound designer on most films by Radu Jude. She edited 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days by Cristian Mungiu. Her filmography includes over 50 credits as a film editor and 16 awards for both editing and sound. She edits both fiction and documentary films and is also the co-author of several documentaries.
On the morning after the award ceremony in Thessaloniki, she takes time for a relaxed conversation in the midst of the departure bustle of international festival guests.
[Dana Bunescu, Yorgos Papalios, Caroline Libresco – International Competition Jury 28 TiDF]
Kirsten Kieninger: So, is it your first time in Thessaloniki?
Dana Bunescu: Yes. The second time in Greece, and the first time in Thessaloniki. Yeah. I’m probably the only Romanian who hadn’t been to Greece before 2020, because it’s a very popular place for summer holidays. I hadn’t had the opportunity because all my travels are connected with work. And that’s it.
But it’s not your first time being on a jury?
It’s not the first time, but I haven’t accepted very often. For a while, I didn’t want to be on a jury. I don’t know why. I had the feeling that maybe my judgment would affect somebody else’s career or life. In Romania, awards are very important, because through awards you can increase your chances of financing your next film. So this is the thing. And somehow I wanted to avoid this kind of responsibility, even if I like to watch films and discuss what I’m seeing. But I didn’t want to be the one who takes responsibility for the final decision. Somehow, in the last five or six years, I didn’t really change my mind, but I said, okay, maybe it’s time to take this responsibility. Even if now I know that I will not change anybody’s life. So I should stay in my chair with my responsibility, but without this crazy idea that I can change somebody else’s life.
That’s really interesting, that you think about that responsibility. Because you know what work it is to make a film, and what it takes—how much time of your life is spent making that film.
Because, being also a film journalist, I’ve been in FIPRESCI juries. And that’s so different. Filmcritics are not thinking about the craft.
Yes, it’s true. I’m always behind the camera. I’m always with the people who put their fingers on the scissors. I’m always on the other side.
Are you watching with an editor’s eye when you are on a jury?
I have an editor’s brain—you cannot turn it off. And I don’t want to turn it off, because I trust the intuition of the editor. When you see a film for the first time, it’s always about intuition and feeling. You cannot pretend that you know what it’s all about, because you don’t. You cannot cover all the cultural backgrounds and historical aspects that can be present in a film with your knowledge. You can’t. But instinct, experience, and sensitivity make this easier. And as an editor, you need very sensitive antennas for all these things. I trust this intuition—the editor’s eye. And also the editor’s and sound designer’s ear, because I keep my sound designer ears open all the time.
That’s interesting.
Yes, because I do both. I cannot edit without working on sound, and I cannot work on sound without being aware of the editing. Sometimes you are hired only for sound, for example with Radu Jude I worked only as a sound designer for 15 years – ten films. And sometimes I have questions regarding the editing. I ask these questions and discuss them with the director, to see whether cutting things differently would serve the sound or the main idea better. These two things go very well together. I’ve done this since I was a student at the film academy in Romania.
So you studied film or especially film editing?
Yes, film editing and sound. It was a kind of hybrid department, created around 1991 or 1992. I graduated in physics first. I worked as a physicist for three and a half years, in the difficult 1990s—the transition between communism and whatever came after. It was wild, especially for scientific research. I worked in a research institute in Bucharest for the electrotechnical industry, but nobody was interested anymore in that kind of research. Everyone wanted to do business. This part of society had to go abroad. But I didn’t want that. So I decided, before emigrating, to try something else in Romania—and that was filmmaking. I wasn’t accepted the first time, nor the second. They explained to me that I wasn’t good enough. But on the third attempt, when I was sure I had nothing to do with filmmaking, I got accepted. I studied editing, sound, and animation for four years. It was a new department where they put everything that hadn’t existed before, since previously they only had directing, camera, and scriptwriting.
I studied montage as well. I studied communications and public relations, and after graduating I didn’t want to do that. I just gave it one try at Filmuni Babelsberg—and they took me.
Fantastic.
I specialized in documentaries. You do both—do you prefer fiction or documentary?
It’s different editing. In the last five years, I decided to focus more on documentary. Fiction is more glamorous in the end, but my interest now is in documentary. People working in documentary are more connected to reality. The connection with real people feels stronger and more honest. Also, I have many questions about a world that is changing rapidly, and documentary allows me to research deeply—not only through existing material, but through reading and other forms of research. It helps me understand things and get rid of fear. In recent years, I’ve felt a kind of fear I had never experienced before. Documentary is a kind of therapy—it helps me understand.
Is that why you started directing documentaries yourself?
Yes, but I don’t call myself a director—I’m a co-author. I build the films. Editing is not sufficiently recognized. People think there must be one leader responsible for everything, but in cinema, that doesn’t exist. It’s teamwork, led by someone, but everyone contributes strongly. Especially in documentary. I chose it also because I find more freedom in building the story. In fiction, too, editing can reshape the film. I only worked on one film that was exactly as written—The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Everything was already perfect. Brilliant directing, brilliant script writing, brilliant acting, so the editing couldn’t be other than brilliant, because everything was there. But in most cases, editing changes a lot. Especially in documentary. And here in Thessaloniki, I met very interesting people—it was a wonderful experience to connect with people I had never met before.
So you enjoyed the experience of being in a jury and would do it again?
Yes, if I’m invited again, I would come. Now I know what I can gain—the human connections. It was wonderful to come here and leave behind my issues from Bucharest. Even if people are very different, humor can connect them. And that was pure joy.
Did you have time to watch films outside the jury program?
No. We had 14 films – three per day. I hope I’ll get to see films from other sections later.
I can really recommend one film, from the Open Horizon section: Mariinka by Pieter-Jan De Pue. Shot on 16mm film over the course of 10 years, it follows the lives of five young people in the Ukrainian frontline town of Marinka. I was deeply shaken by this film – unfortunately, there was only a single screening. Were there films in the competition you especially liked from an editor’s perspective?
Yes – Closure by Michał Marczak, which we awarded the Golden Alexander to. And I also liked the German film Around Paradise directed by Yulia Lokshina, filmed by Zeno Legner, edited by Urte Alfs, sound design by Alejandro Weyler, although I would cut some didactic parts …
I watched that one — about the gated community Paraíso Verde in Paraguay, run by an Austrian, a “safe haven” for conspiracy theorists, vaccine skeptics, and far-right extremists from around the world.
… But it’s a very brave film, and the work behind it is impressive. They have been there four times or something. And the way they are working with these two realities, this gated community and the Paraguayan people around that actually allow them to set the reference system. And to understand from where we can go with the madness and the toxicity. It shows something frightening about today’s world – this rise of something we struggle to name, maybe fascism, maybe something new. That frightens me, and I admired the film.
Yes. And I really liked how they let the film begin—with that outside view over the fence.
Yes, it feels like an easygoing film, until you are confronted with the whole thing.
And you start to feel more and more uncomfortable.
Exactly. You start having trouble breathing. I was very impressed, also because the team was very young. I was really impressed by their work. They presented the whole team here at the Olympion Cinema, and I was so happy to see that all the directors present their films here and come with their teams.
And some even with their editors.
Yes, exactly.
But not all. I was at two screenings where the editors were there, but they didn’t want to come on stage.
They didn’t want to, or they weren’t introduced?
One editor was even invited to come forward, and she politely declined. I think that’s a pity, because I believe editors should be more visible. Editors can tell you so much about the films they’ve worked on—they have so much insight.
Editors should be more visible. In Romania there was even a joke that editors cannot speak. When I received an award at the Berlinale, I decided to speak. Because all the questions that came with this award were: Who has the final say? Who makes the decision? It was about authority, you know. Who has the last word? Were you really the one who should receive this award, or maybe someone else? That question was implicitly there. That’s when I realized that actually no one, except editors themselves, understands what an editor does. Since 2017, I’ve been speaking about my work, because I know my work. But I can also generalize it and extrapolate the contribution that editors make. I also started speaking about it because, in a country where the idea of authoritarianism was so deeply rooted in the general mentality, people couldn’t understand that it’s actually not about hierarchy, but about partnership.
I experienced the same thing in the questions during a masterclass I was invited to by the Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen. In 2022, he had been invited to give an online masterclass in Kyiv. He didn’t want to do a traditional masterclass—he wanted a dialogue, and he wanted to have that dialogue with me. And it was fascinating to see the kinds of questions the audience asked—directed at a man from Western Europe, who has the right to be considered a co-author and to be seen as an artist—and then to compare them with the questions I received.
They were the same questions: who is the boss, who has the final say. Exactly the same. And I told them: do you realize that you are treating two people, who do the same work with the same energy, the same commitment, and the same responsibility, differently? And yet you see us differently.
That’s when I understood that this comes from a certain mentality in this region, in Eastern Europe, where we have lived under dictatorships for a long time. It comes from this strongly hierarchical way of structuring societies. That was very striking for me, because I already knew it from Romania.
And that was the reason why I started to go out, to speak, to work with people on equal terms. And I was surprised—but not completely surprised—to see that this is not only the case in Romania, but part of a broader shared mentality.
Being an editor is more than just a profession.
Yeah, it’s a choice—a life choice. It’s something that allows me to live many other lives, you know? That’s the thing. Because I really feel that I have this chance – living with the questions that a film puts on the table is something that actually allows me to have a richer life. And in this therapeutic way that I mentioned at the beginning, having all these questions on the table – and some answers to them, maybe not complete answers, maybe even wrong ones – but still, the fact that I’m trying to find an answer actually allows me to decompress myself. Why did you choose editing?
I chose editing because I felt I could do many things quite good – not one thing perfectly. I like working with images, sound, music, words … Editing is where it all comes together.
I wanted to become the next Marie Curie, but that wasn’t possible in the 1990s. So I became the first Dana Bunescu instead.
But you are enjoying your path of life?
It’s not bad. No, I don’t feel regrets. Sometimes I’m panicking. In the last 5 years I had two burnouts when I had to stop for a year because I couldn’t find any kind of interest in making films. I had really bad times. So for example, I had this moment, when I worked on The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Watching all those materials – especially the ones from the 1980s – it was very difficult, because they started to resonate in my head, in my body, every frame. And I panicked. I felt that I couldn’t continue.
The producer said, okay, I will ask someone else to watch the materials with the director, and you will just edit. But I said this is impossible, this is stupid – I have to watch. But leave me some space, because I need to panic, I need to feel this. If I don’t feel anything, that’s bad – that’s a bad sign. It means I’m not getting anything from it. So it’s not easy.
It was similar with the film I’m working on right now, with two young directors from Romania. One studied film directing in Santa Cruz, and the other is a journalist. They wanted to make a film about the Romanian Pentecostal community in Arizona. It’s very similar to this Around Paradise story – it resonated a lot. It was very toxic to watch the material. For three months I watched around 200 hours of footage. At the same time, the whole year started with the elections – we had elections in Romania. So between January and the end of March, I watched the material. Then I had to stop because of the elections – you know we had the cancelled election in 2024, with this candidate supported by Russians through TikTok algorithms, appearing out of nowhere. Someone who actually had the same kind of profile as the characters in Around Paradise. So this was the fear I felt.
I wanted to make this film to cure that fear. But it was difficult. I watched the material, then I had to stop for two months until the next elections were over in Romania. Now we have the right president for these difficult times. And I continued editing from the beginning of June until the end. I got intoxicated, really. I worked alone. I try to have a lot of discussions beforehand with the directors, but then I need to stay alone with the material – to deal with the storylines, the characters, all these significant moments, and the connections through which these moments are built. This is the way I work.
I prefer long discussions beforehand, but then working alone is the best. And to exchange thoughts and feelings over time. But staying alone with the material is the best. Yeah, that’s what I like. But what I also like are the preliminary discussions, because we actually talk more than we watch the films. We talk about ourselves. It becomes a kind of therapeutic space – a therapy room, even before it becomes a film studio. We talk about ourselves, our interests, our feelings, and somehow we arrive at a shared understanding – or a new understanding – of what we are doing together. This is the thing I like most. And I make friends through this process, because I get to know the person better, and they get to know me better. And sometimes we remain friends.