Biography

Her sister is producer Mara Adina.

Studied filmmaking at the 'Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology' in Manchester, UK.

I studied sociology and anthropology at UBB [University Babes-Bolyai] in my hometown, Cluj [Cluj-Napoca, Romania] and then gradually moved towards documentary filmmaking via visual anthropology, which is the perfect marriage of the two disciplines. Anthropology gave me some invaluable tools as a documentary filmmaker as both disciplines attempt to understand and look in depth at different realities than one's own.[June 2012]

I grew up in Communist Romania in the 1980s, and my first contact with American films was through the voice of Irina Margareta Nistor, who dubbed thousands of the black-market movies that were watched clandestinely by millions of Romanians at the time. I wanted to recapture the magic of those nights when we'd watch 4-5 films in a row and feel we'd opened a window to the West.[Jan.2015]