The sprawling Roma family at the heart of investigative journalist Radu Ciorniciuc's directorial debut functions much like a small town. For 18 years, Gica, Niculina, and their nine children have lived on the shores of an abandoned water reservoir in the Bucharest Delta. An overcrowded one-room shack without electricity or running water serves as their home. The rest of the world may consider cell phones and computers essential, but the Enache clan lives much as they might have centuries ago.
They don't have any apparent friends or neighbors, and they don't seem to care. They catch and grow their own food, while older son Vali sells fish in town that he catches by hand. Instead of school, his illiterate brothers and sisters swim, wrestle in the mud, and traverse the lake by canoe. They don't appear to have any other source of income, but they have what they need.
Though social service representatives drop by on occasion to check on their welfare, Gica does his best to misdirect them as he doesn't want to lose his kids, who he considers his greatest achievement. When government officials decide to turn the richly biodiverse region into a nature park, they have to leave the only home most of them have ever known. After stuffing their belongings into garbage bags and dismantling their shack, they move into government housing.
Eighteen-year-old Vali gets a job as a park worker and begins a relationship with a 15-year-old neighbor. His siblings attend school, but his parents, unaccustomed to paid work, don't do much of anything. Gica lolls around drinking and smoking. Left to their own devices, the kids play in the streets, scavenge refuse, and scuffle with cops. Day by day, city life grinds them down. Just as their landlady threatens them with eviction, Vali's girlfriend finds out she's pregnant. He recommends an abortion, but she wants to have the child. Ciorniciuc doesn't spell it out, but he appears to be following in his father's footsteps, and yet the two only grow further apart the longer they remain in the city.
On the one hand, his father wants him to contribute to the family's income, but on the other, Vali wants to get his own place. There's a sense that they've lost a paradise they're unlikely to reclaim. Most of this unfolds so cinematically it's easy to forget you’re watching a documentary until Prince Charles, a conservation proponent, shows up to attend the park's groundbreaking. Acasa, Our Home belongs to a lineage of recent narrative and non-fiction films, like The Wolfpack and Captain Fantastic, in which long-sheltered family members attempt to make their way in an indifferent modern world. You're left with the sense that the kids will figure things out eventually, but that their parents never will. They left a part of themselves behind when they traded the wilderness for civilization. Recommended.