At the age of 31 I moved into the same house as my 91 year old grandmother. I found her alone, almost mute. Days, if not weeks, would go by without her speaking to anyone. Thus she had lost the ability to articulate words naturally. I felt guilty. I could have visited her more often.She had a lot to tell. Her tongue "untied" and she spoke. At the slightest challenge from me, she would begin to tell her personal history. With a simple question, I could determine the moment I wanted to know about: the childhood in which she dreamed of becoming a teacher, the way my grandfather courted her and the marriage at the age of 16, the displacement north of the Danube after the surrender of the Cadrilater territory and the wanderings throughout the country, where the authorities were sending them, the coincidence of transiting Ploiești by train at the very moment of the bombing, and the way she and her mother took shelter, each with a child in her arms, in the craters left by the bombs, thinking that another bomb will not hit exactly where another one fell, the way she dried the children's diapers on her stomach, under her clothes, or how she untied her doilies to make them socks. Moments when the men in the family didn't know about them, my grandfather being at the war front, and my great-grandfather around the country, trying to get food.

​I wanted to film her talking. To do a kind of interview that was to show collective and personal history interweave. Under the false impression that she was immortal, I delayed until it was too late. She gave me a generous ten-year break. I didn't use it.

​After she died, I took some photos in her house. A kind of portrait in the absence of the model, composed of the personal space, which can outline a mentality: that of the one accustomed to earning his bread from the work of own hands, of the one whom poverty shaped to be frugal but not stingy, to recycle for reasons more intimate than saving the planet, to always show good decency, to hold destiny in one's own hands regardless of what is happening around, not to be naive despite poor education, to put family above everything else, not to whine, to always be ready for any trouble, but to live intensely the moments of joy, to survive.