Among the 39 nominees in the 38th International Emmy Awards (The International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences) we find The World According to Ion B., a documentary directed by Alexander Nanau and produced by HBO Romania in collaboration with Alexander Nanau Production.
It will compete in the Arts Programming, next to TV Globo’s All My Life: Cazuza, BBC’s Imagine…David Hockney: A Bigger Picture and TV Asahi’s Personas Inside Out.
The World According to Ion B. tells the story of Ion Bârlădeanu, a 62 years old homeless man. He sleeps on a filthy mattress at the end of a garbage chute of a bloc on Calea Mosilor, in exchange for sorting the garbage of the landlords. When he was young, Ion was dreaming about becoming a film director. In the 70’s he started to create collages that he refers to as “my films”.
Dan Popescu is a young gallery owner that has accidentally heard about Ion Bârlădeanu and decided to visit him. He was overwhelmed by more than 800 collages, made by the homeless artist between the ’70s and the ’90s. Those were times when such art manifestations were forbidden and totally inaccessible to Romanians. Ironically, this self-taught man is convinced that he invented collage, since he has never seen this art form before. Nanau follows Ion Bârlădeanu’s life from when he was just a homeless man, until he became a world renowned artist.
“The world according to Ion B. is for me a way of exploring the question of what is art in in its pure form and what is a pure artist” explained the director. Nanau’s film won the Best Balkan Documentary Award at Dokufest Prizren in Kosovo and participated at many other film festivals, including Telluride, Jerusalem, HotDocs in Toronto and Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF).