Logline
Ana, a Romanian in London, receives her
indefinite leave to remain but feels herself
drifting. As borrowed language replaces
her own, jars from home become anchors. A
quiet portrait of displacement and the
hunger to remain oneself.
Produced by: Carlotta Beck Peccoz.
Starring: Eliza Agrosoaie.
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Specs
UK, ROMANIA
DIGITAL
16:9
14 MIN
ENGLISH & ROMANIAN
Subtitles available in English, Romanian, French
SYNOPSIS
Ana, a young Romanian woman living in London, returns from home carrying a suitcase filled with jars of homemade food. The same day, she receives her indefinite leave to remain, a document she once believed would change everything.
Instead, it unsettles her.
Across a single day, Ana drifts through the quiet, unseen spaces of London: the restaurant kitchen where she scrapes plates, the streets where she moves unnoticed, and the solitude of her flat. She finds herself suspended between identities: no longer fully belonging to where she comes from, yet unable to belong anywhere else.
Alone that evening, she turns to the jars she brought back, searching for something familiar, an attempt to hold onto what is already slipping away. The gesture deepens, becoming more insistent. Then, a quiet release, where what was held in can no longer be contained.
Melancholy Jars rests in the suspended space where nothing fully belongs, caught between the life she has been swept into and the home she has left behind.
director's approach
Every time I fly back to London from Romania, my suitcase is full of jars. Food my mother made, wrapped carefully in clothes so they don’t break. Even when customs say I’m not allowed to bring them, I do. They’re the only way I can bring a piece of home with me. All my friends do the same.
That’s the image where everything began.
Tolstoy said: if you want to be universal, start by painting your own village. But I don’t have a village. I have too many languages, too many traditions, too many places I was shaped by and never fully belonged to. So this film isn’t painting a village. It’s painting the absence of one.
“Melancholy Jars” is a film about belonging nowhere, and the small, stubborn ways we resist it. About the stranger who tells you that you don’t seem Romanian anymore, and you don’t know if that’s a compliment. About a document that was supposed to change everything, and doesn’t.
Romanian is the second most spoken language in London: a world so present, yet so invisible. This invisibility felt urgent to me. This story needed to be told now, in this city, at this moment.
The film opens in documentary mode: faces, sounds, the London we don’t often see on screen. From there it moves inward. Visually, we worked in the tension between stable and handheld, a slow accumulation that mirrors Ana’s unravelling without dramatising it. Sound plays a particular role: rather than the camera telling you how to feel, it’s sound that quietly pulls you toward her.
It was important to me to work with a mostly female crew of immigrant women from Eastern Europe, not only because they could genuinely understand what we were trying to make, but because the way we make films is inseparable from what we’re making them about.
Working with Eliza, our lead, we built her emotional arc together, then stripped it back. We prioritised containment: a performance that holds everything in, until it can’t.
This isn’t a film that condemns its character to an ugly world. It’s an observation, a celebration, and a quiet weep all at once. The ending holds that tension: absurdity and humor alongside grief. Not the end of the world, only the end of the world Ana thought she was building.
Ana’s story is Romanian. But the feeling beneath it belongs to anyone who has ever tried to make a home somewhere new, or who has stopped being sure what home means at all.
credits
Director of Photography – Sabina Claici
First Camera Assistant – George Telling
Second Camera Assistant – Hannah Vivancos-Drury
Gaffer – Tamas Szabo
Spark – Toby Norman
Sound recordist – Adina Istrate
Costume & Production Designer – Maria Tatarnikova
Hair and Make Up Designer – Sophia Davison
Ana – Eliza Agrosoaie
James – Mark Parsons
Paul – Dimitris Kafataris
Woman – Mia Gutu
Ruxi – Antonia Scutaru
Edited by – Carmela
Sound Mix – Alex Lunney
Colourist – Alyssa Media
VFX 2D Artist – Giacomo Verri
Production Assistant – Anfisa Semenova
Runner – Emilia Matyja
Unit Photographer – Josef Thompson
Poster & Credits Designer – Andreea Marosan
Trailer – Piotr Plencler