Milk Teeth
Drama • 2025 • 1h 44m
Dinti De Lapte
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
Maria, a ten-year-old girl, becomes the unwitting witness to the disappearance of her older sister Alina, who vanishes mysteriously after stepping out to throw away the trash—radio tuned in included.
“What we lack speaks louder than what we possess.”
– Karl Kraus
– Karl Kraus
Set in the twilight of the Ceaușescu regime, Milk Teeth unfolds in a small Romanian town in 1989, where silence and bleakness permeate every daily gesture. Alina’s disappearance generates a void that extends far beyond the private sphere: the family begins to disintegrate under the oppression of a political system at its end. The authorities, more concerned with safeguarding the image of power, dismiss Maria’s account as childish whimsy, stripping her testimony of all weight.
Director Mihai Mincan constructs a painful coming-of-age journey: Maria is left alone with her questions, forced to confront a world collapsing around her. The film becomes a visual allegory of a nation in decline, torn between memories of control and an uncertain future.
The work convinces not only through its strong emotional impact, but also through its artistic rigor: cinematography, sound, and staging contribute to a visual and auditory style suspended between reality and rarefaction—a perfect register for narrating absence, the individual sacrificed on the altar of an overbearing era.
The young actress playing Maria stands out for her delicacy and strength, embodying the drama of a broken childhood, but also the silent resilience of a child who gathers words within herself, waiting for the moment to finally speak them aloud.
Historical records note the disappearance of about a hundred children a year. Within this tragic horizon, Alina’s vanishing does not appear as an isolated case but as the embodiment of a diffuse, silent evil, made all the more cruel by its opaque context. As Alina throws away the trash under her sister’s powerless gaze, mocked by their peers, the irreparable unfolds.
The mother refuses to surrender, while the father seems to sink into a resignation without footholds. Maria, the youngest, collects clues, observes, listens, investigates with the obstinacy of one who still believes in the possibility of meaning. She even swears loyalty to power during a school ceremony, immortalized in a group photograph: the omnipresent red—flags, fabrics, symbols—becomes the visual frame of her upbringing, a branded color that guards memory, lies, and secrecy all at once.
The film’s imagery delves into the squalor of a disintegrating world: crumbling walls, warmthless interiors, soulless collective rituals. In this void, Maria clings to a walnut, a small fetish and promise of a reunion that seems impossible. Childhood is stained with irreducible pain: questions, traces, and clues remain suspended, as if every gesture were inhabited by the tension of waiting and by the suspicion that something might still happen.
The girl’s journey thus becomes the parable of an identity taking shape within a time that oppresses her. Her awareness moves between absence and presence, between the void left by Alina and the suffocating excess of a power that admits no exceptions. From this tension arises a fragile yet irreducible consciousness: the possibility that, even powerless, a child’s voice may open the way to a question no regime can silence.
Milk Teeth is an intense and caustic work: disappearance becomes a metaphor for an entire era that leaves only silence and tension. A story of loss and survival, of discovery and fear, it invites reflection on the power of buried voices and on the resilience of the individual who still strives to be heard—especially when fading into an absent and voiceless presence.
“The invisible is the only reality that cannot be denied.”
– Paul Valéry
– Paul Valéry
