MILK TEETH
PRODUCTION/DISTRIBUTION
Director: Mihai Mincan
Production: deFilm (Radu Stancu, Ioana Lascăr)
Co-production: Remora Films (Cyriac Auriol) Ström Pictures (Monica Hellström), StudioBauhaus (Konstantinos Vassilaros), Screening Emotions (Poli Angelova, Nikolay Todorov)
Running Time: 104’
Language: Romanian
Country: Romania, France, Denmark, Greece, Bulgaria
Year: 2025
Main Cast: Emma Ioana Mogos, Marina Palii, Igor Babiac, Istvan Teglas
Screenplay: Mihai Mincan
Cinematographer: George Chiper-Lillemark
Editor: Dragoș Apetri
Costume Designer: Dana Păpăruz
Music: Marius Leftărache, Nicolas Becker
Sound: Nicolas Becker, Cyril Holtz, Benjamin Laurent, Ange Hubert, Frédéric Dabo
Visual Effects: Copenhagen Visual
WORLD SALES:
Cercamon - Sebastien Chesneau, Dorian Magagnin
PO Box 416 207
Dubai, UAE
Tel: +33 6 83 94 34 66
E-mail: dorian@cercamon.biz
Web: https://www.cercamon.biz/
PRESS OFFICE:
Marijana Harder
Immanuelkirchstraße 12
10405 Berlin, Germany
Tel: +49 (0) 177 79 42 871
E-mail: mail@marijanaharder.com
Web: https://marijanaharder.com
SYNOPSIS
Romania, 1989. The twilight of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. In a small, isolated town, Maria, a ten-year-old girl, is the last person to witness her sister disappearing before her eyes. Torn apart by the loss, she tries to make sense of a new, terrifying reality. Can she summon the courage to grow up?
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The first image of Dinți de lapte came to me in 2019: a young girl listening in total silence, her right ear pressed against a cement wall. It was a dream, one of many I began having after reading a Romanian Communist Militia file from 1989, about the disappearance of an eleven-year-old girl from a small town. I wanted to make a film about a kind of muteness — the inability to articulate or describe in words an inner universe constantly on the verge of bursting into flames. Over the years, I twisted and changed this idea several times, somehow trying to find the film’s own “voice”. It became a coming-of-age story about the aftermath of a tragedy — a film about a young girl who tries to make sense of a confusing and cruel world that suddenly opens up before her eyes.
Caught between two dimensions — reality and fantasy, political oppression and the rise of the so-called “new world” at the beginning of the 1990s — this little girl represents the “lost generation of children”, the same generation I belong to. The children who believed in freedom, only to discover that our voices would not be heard by anyone.
This is how Dinți de lapte became what it is now: a film that chooses not to speak directly about a child struck by muteness, but about someone who gathers words in her mind, waiting for the right moment to shout them out to the entire world.