This Is Who We Are: Bogdan Apetri
This Is Who We Are is a series featuring Columbia School of the Arts’ professors, covering careers, pedagogy, and art-making. Here, we talk with Associate Professor Bogdan Apetri '06 about the intersection of life experience and filmmaking, the art of casting and character development, and why you shouldn't limit your writing to what you already know.
Associate Professor Bogdan Apetri ’06 remembers sitting in a Romanian courtroom in his twenties as a lawyer, waiting for his turn to speak to the judge. Looking out the window, he thought, “God, I need to be a filmmaker.” After university, he spent a year as a criminal defense attorney to please his parents. He hated it, but it was a way to meet people he otherwise wouldn't have.
“Being a filmmaker is like being a lawyer: neither of them can afford judging a client or a character. I was a lawyer for people I would have never talked to: thieves, criminals, killers. You have to take their side to defend them properly. I learned how to write a character from that perspective. Being a filmmaker is exactly that. You put yourself in the skin of every character and approach them with empathy. To become a better artist, you need to study human beings.”
Apetri moved to New York early on in his career, where he graduated with his MFA from the School of the Arts. In 2010, he directed and wrote the feature film Periferic (Outbound). Funded in part by Romania's National Center for Cinema, the film was shown at some of the best festivals across the world and won numerous international awards. In 2020 he directed his second feature film, Neidentificat (Unidentified). Awarded a special Jury Prize in Warsaw, it went on to win a FIPRESCI Award at the TIFF Transilvania International Film Festival. In 2021 he released his third feature film, Miracol (Miracle), which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and was then picked up by the prestigious Memento International Sales film company.
All his films are set in his small hometown of Piatra Neamt in Romania. This choice is strategic; he believes the small-town setting allows for a more authentic and relatable portrayal of characters and their stories. He knows everyone and everything—how they joke, how they drink coffee, and how they park their cars—but that doesn’t mean he can't turn his local story into one that resonates with global audiences, wherever they are.
“I want to tell stories that are relatable in other parts of the world. If my movies weren't about universal topics, I wouldn’t be able to show them in Lincoln Center. People wouldn’t understand them. My movies should resonate with a small town in Kansas, a small town in Bolivia, or a small town in China. There’s 90% universality in every good story, and 10% specificity that makes it unique. No matter what is happening in politics at any given moment, some truths are going to be truths one thousand years from now.”
Recently, in one of his film workshops, a student showed a short film where two characters broke up while sitting on a bench. The student complained that the actors, who had met that day, were actually flirting. “On set, you’re never going to have a perfect situation,” Apetri said. “So take advantage of that. Maybe you can shoot a scene where they're breaking up but, at the same time, they still crave each other.”
This type of flexibility is an important part of the creative process for Apetri, who believes that characters gain depth through multiple revisions and contributions from actors during casting and rehearsals. This iterative process, he finds, leads to more nuanced and interesting character portrayals. “In my scripts, I almost never put physical descriptions for my characters,” he said. “I tell my students that during casting, I’m seeing them and thinking: I hadn’t thought about this, but this is interesting. I don’t necessarily have a perfect idea of who the character is.”
Apetri often reminds his students to focus solely on the essence of their films, advising them to draw inspiration from what he calls an “endless well.” “You cannot pay attention to what's outside of the movie,” he said. “Imagine your movie is like a well, a fountain without a bottom. All your ideas should come from that well.” Creativity, according to Apetri, should not just be influenced by admiration for famous directors like Scorsese or Wong Kar-wai, but should remain rooted in the authenticity of a particular filmmaker’s scenes and characters. In fact, Apetri challenges the idea of imitation in the early years of an artist’s career. While he acknowledges the value of learning by copying—as the Impressionists did in the Louvre—he insists that there comes a time when one must forge an original path. “Grad school is the perfect time for that.”
For Apetri, finding that original path means understanding exactly what a film requires and committing to it wholeheartedly, regardless of which styles are in vogue. In his movie Miracle, a film where a young novice nun sneaks out of her convent to visit the hospital, there are just 42 long takes, compared to the contemporary average of 1,050 shots per movie. Apetri didn’t do this because he was following a particular new wave of cinema; he did it because the tension of the movie demanded it. “You have to understand what the movie needs, and be religious about it,” he said.
Toward the end of our interview, I asked him about the most overrated advice in cinema. He chuckled and quickly replied, "This is easy! ‘Write about what you know.’ No! I think you should write about what you want to know. That’s much more interesting.”
When it comes to underrated advice, he circled back to his core belief that films should focus on human stories rather than technical details.
“Filmmaking is about people,” he said. “It’s not about the craft, knowing filters, camera codecs, or technology. These are just tools for a much higher purpose: to explore human nature. When a character enters a room and asks someone a difficult question, you have to ask yourself: What is the character thinking? What should the audience feel at this moment? Like someone once said, being a filmmaker is like putting a mirror in front of the viewer and saying, look at yourself—this is how humans are.”
Bogdan Apetri co-produced 3 Backyards by Professor Eric Mendelsohn, a feature film that won the Best Directing Award at Sundance in 2010 and was selected for New Directors/New Films in New York. He co-produced The Bravest, the Boldest by Moon Molson (Sundance 2014), Love Hunter by Nemanja and Brane Bala (New York Times Critics’ Pick, 2014), Advantageous by Jennifer Phang (Jury Prize at Sundance in 2015), The Mend by John Magary (2016 Film Independent Spirit Awards Nominee), Nobody’s Watching by Julia Solomonoff (Jury Prize at Tribeca, 2017), Bikini Moon by Milcho Manchevski, Blaze by Ethan Hawke (Sundance Special Jury Prize, 2018) and Song Without a Name by Melina Leon '08 (Cannes, 2019).