How does one film the inner life of a child? Mihai Mincan’s Milk Teeth approaches this question not through dialogue or grand gestures, but through fleeting, unsettling details: a strand of hair catching the light, a face half-obscured, the silence between breaths. The camera is troublingly intimate, almost intrusive, as if it were attempting to seize the very texture of a girl’s thoughts. Why follow Maria (played by Emma Ioana Mogos) ? Why insist on showing these small fragments? Because within them lies an unspoken story, one that stretches far beyond a single family into the shadowed heart of an era.
In the “ideal” communist society, certain horrors officially did not exist. Kidnapping, sexual violence, disappearance, such words had no place in a world that proclaimed itself perfect. And yet, in this carefully orchestrated silence, an eleven-year-old girl vanishes. Her absence unravels her family: the mother spirals into fear, the sister undergoes a painful transformation, the father collapses into quiet despair. The authorities, the militia, prove insufficient, even negligent. Nothing is resolved. The child is gone.
Why watch, then? Because Milk Teeth does not seek closure. Its power lies in revealing what a society chose to hide. Hundreds of children disappeared under communism in Romania, their cases erased or suppressed, their names unspoken on state radio. The propaganda machine broadcast only glory, progress, and slogans of collective happiness. Against this false brightness, Mincan’s film turns to the shadows, to the silences, the voids, the stifled breaths that defined private life in an age where everything was regimented, where nothing was permitted to exist outside official order.
The soundscape is disturbing by design. Gaps, absences, muffled silences force the audience to feel the claustrophobia of a world where intimacy was stripped of language. Love, grief, faith, all were confined to the narrow walls of the family, hidden from the public eye. The horizon was close, brutally so: the future offered no projection, no freedom. Within this suffocating order, the unspoken trauma of a missing child becomes unbearable, for there is no space — social, cultural, political — to mourn her properly.
Mincan sets his story in Romania on the threshold of the 1990s, a period evoked with remarkable precision. Details resonate: the lights cutting out without warning; the discovery of chocolate at the age of ten, as if tasting another world; the poverty and deprivation that permeated daily existence. The film captures a society where misery was pervasive and where shadows inevitably crept into the fabric of family life.
By telling this story through the eyes, and the breathing, of a little girl with braids, Milk Teeth achieves something rare: it restores to history the invisible children who were silenced twice, first by disappearance and then by political erasure. One must remember that Mihai Mincan is first a philosopher. This is a film about absence, but also about perception, or how a child, through her fragile awareness, can embody the contradictions of an entire society.
Alexandra I. Mas, 2025
