Remember me

EDIT: Wow! My second DD! Thank you sooo much for the feature !! Truly grateful and honored!

“Remember me” is the result of 4 months of dedicated and almost non-stop work. As with my other big project, “A story of hope for the bullied”, it was more the sense of responsibility towards the seriousness of the subject rather than the hard work itself, that represented the greatest challenge for me. I still feel like I did not even get close to doing justice to the subject, and as much as I don’t like to come up with excuses, had I had more time and any previous experience in animating I would’ve achieved a far better result and made the message a lot clearer and cinematographically more appealing… But what’s done is done, I’ll do better next time.

One of the things I have enjoyed most about working on this animation was the research part because I got to learn so much more about this particular episode of history, not just in historical facts and figures but also from a more humane point view… All the stories, letters, testimonies from the battle front and of surviving veterans that I have read and listened to have had a deep impact on me as they made me realize just how wrong our perspective of war is, not just WWII, but war in general. There is nothing glorious about war… On both sides and in every battle it is humans not numbers that die. War is not as simple as it is being portrayed by Hollywood. It is not black and white, good versus evil, Elves versus Orcs, Jedis versus Stormtroopers… Allies versus the Axis.

The Romanian army was the third largest and most important combatant on the Eastern Front, after the Soviet Union and Germany. At Stalingrad alone about 160.000 men perished. Due to the harsh post-war restrictions of the USSR, their remains were never brought back to their country, the cemeteries where they were buried in Russia were destroyed and the war heroes that made it back alive, under the newly installed communist regime, were imprisoned or executed.