I had been wondering about the idea of crime and the act of murder after I saw a TV series on Romanian criminals a few years ago. What struck me was that most of those crimes were perpetrated within a circle of people who knew one another: parents, friends, co-workers or neighbours. I also realised that as an ordinary citizen, I had access to this "world of crime", this underworld, only through cinema, literature and the media. I have always been convinced that they give a crude misrepresentation of both the profile of murderers and the act of murder. As I tried to mentally visualise a murder, by starting with the evidence and finishing with the confessions of the murderer—often the only witness to the act—I more or less came to understand how events unfolded and how one thing led to another. However I still felt I was coming closer to cinema than to real life. Bearing this in mind and wishing to avoid the clichés that are too often conveyed by films, my purpose with Aurora is to reconstruct the act of killing by integrating the personal story of the criminal into the crime and by avoiding any form of discourse that the fact that even all documentary representations can be called into question, since the moment of the crime and the moment of the confession are two separate moments, and no matter what you do, the actual crime remains distinct from the recounted crime. Beyond the questions generated by this topic, and beyond my anxieties about them, I worked relentlessly to make a "realistic" film and tried to render the toxic climate reigning in post communist Bucharest as accurately as possible. The demands of documentary like realism are a constant in my overall vision of film; the raw image is therefore accompanied by direct sound recording. I worked with both professional and non-professional actors and I approached with the film in the same way as a researcher. I sought to reconstruct the act of killing by depicting the dark side of people I see every day: people who have never committed a murder.
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