A Safe Place is the story of a woman, Lucia — a mother and a wife — who appears to live a life grounded in conservative principles and spends a short, peaceful vacation with her family and a couple of friends in a Bulgarian village, not far from the Romanian border.

I chose these locations on the western shores of the Black Sea to film Lucia’s story because, despite the peaceful atmosphere and the welcoming locals who show no sign of tension, this region was, at the beginning of the 20th century, contested between Bulgaria and Romania, shifting from one country to the other and enduring the storms of historical change. Today, traces of that history can still be seen in the fact that the elderly Bulgarian inhabitants either speak or perfectly understand Romanian. It is a place that has preserved much of its natural wilderness, with small villages whose subsistence depends entirely on tourism in the summer and on agriculture — a patriarchal society that holds tightly to tradition, yet is accustomed to the modern idea of the foreigner and to the peaceful invasions of global tourism.

I set Lucia’s story here precisely because these places seemed to embody the idea of the stranger and of estrangement. Through the life she leads and the choices she has made, Lucia herself becomes a foreigner — to the social construct of family, to her circle of friends, and to her own identity. I see her as representative of a generation of Eastern European women who have tried to redefine the social model they were raised in — women caught between two worlds: one still bound by conservative, patriarchal values, and another that challenges them through individual choice and self-discovery.

Her story is about a woman’s identity today — about the continuous effort to negotiate personal and social boundaries, and about the loss or questioning of that identity — as a woman who must reconcile multiple roles that often contradict or constantly reshape one another. I wanted to speak about personal, social, and physical boundaries — about their crossing or their brutal violation, about irreconcilable positions. About a world in the process of repositioning and negotiation, about the relationships between women and men — through a classic story, as old as it is still current in its moralizing perception — and how these relations are redefined in the wake of social and ideological change. About the difficulty of letting go of positions of power, on the one hand, and the inertia of a gender model that makes us all behave toward one another — sometimes awkwardly, other times abusively, and often violently.