‘I Matter’ review: Romanian children’s home drama is sometimes conventional, always authentic

Dir/scr: Alina Serban. Romania/Ger/Bel. 2026. 101mins

During the end credits of I Matter, we catch a glimpse of the film’s actual wrap party, held inside the Romanian children’s home where the film was shot, and where many of its younger performers still live. It gives documented shape to something that comes through in every frame of this empathetic drama: that Roma actress and filmmaker Alina Serban’s heartfelt feature is authentic to the core. Based on her own experience, it shows how the triple stigma of belonging to a minority group that is still today the focus of structural racism and social exclusion, growing up in the care system, and being a woman in a male-dominated culture can impact a life.

Denisa Farcas’ excellent performance provides undeniable electricity

Screening in Venice’s Spotlight section, this is the first film by a female Roma director to have been selected for official selection in a major festival. That, together with the biographical angle, should help to drum up further festival attention for I Matter; beyond, it’s a title that seems more suited for streaming. It’s a politically-engaged, feelgood youth film that doesn’t shy away from cute tactics – right down to the pop song ‘I Matter’ by Romanian singer Amira Bugheata that plays out alongside the end credits.

Three institutions dominate the action and act as dramatic pressure points: the Bucharest children’s home where Denisa Farcas’ late-teen Rebeca lives; the male prison where her father is serving time for theft; and the acting school that offers her a way forward. Each comes with its own tensions. During a prison show, a nervous Rebeca reads out a sincere, sentimental poem to her dad who is sitting in the audience of inmates, a mild guy surrounded by tattooed heavies. Soon enough, she’s back in her safe space, the rough and tumble world of the children’s home, where as much Romani as Romanian is spoken.

But here too, life is precarious, A series of forlorn phone calls establish that most of the kids here have parents or relatives that can’t or won’t look after them. The older ones like Rebeca and her bestie Simona (Angelina Pavel) help to mother the youngsters, overseen by an entirely female adult staff. Their compassion contrasts with the rigidity of a pair of casually racist government inspectors who drop in unannounced and arrange for the removal of any residents who have reached the age of 18, whether or not they have anywhere to go. Rebeca is only a couple of months away from that abyss – but an exception is made, we learn, for anyone who can land a place in the university or further education system.

Serban’s scripting is sometimes conventional – especially in an end-of-second-act blip in Rebeca’s hero’s journey. And a sweet romantic subplot involving a Roma graffiti artist (music artist Alexandru Stancu, a.k.a. JUNO) adds very little except domestic box-office traction. But Farcas’ excellent performance provides undeniable electricity, and I Matter dwells absorbingly, and movingly, on the mix of internalized oppression and institutional syndrome that keeps someone like Rebeca from realizing her potential.

The acting school she is accepted by seems to welcome difference yet, and when she erupts when she feels she’s been accused of stealing, her fellow students are shocked by her anger. Yet when she’s on a bus with her dad, a woman standing behind them nervously shifts her hip pack to where she can see it. Rebeca and Simona motivate each other by reminding themselves that they are “smart gypsies”, but this owning and reversal of a racial slur hangs awkwardly in the air. Aren’t they just smart women?