About
Alina Manolache is a film director, artist, and lecturer in documentary design. She began making documentaries after graduating from the Bucharest Academy of Fine Arts, when she was awarded an artist-in-residence grant for her first film, Your Visit Starts Here, shot at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her second film, End of Summer (2016), an exploration of youth and masculinity set in rural Romania, debuted at Switzerland’s Visions du Réel. Lost Kids on the Beach (2020), a collective portrait of the first generation to grow up in post-communist Romania – her own generation – premiered in Amsterdam, at IDFA. For this film, Filmmaker Magazine featured Alina Manolache as one of the top female filmmakers of IDFA 2020. Alina collaborated with The Guardian, as a commissioned director (along with Vladimir Potop), on a film about astronaut Jessica Meir’s experience on the International Space Station during the Covid-19 lockdown. 2020: A Covid Space Odyssey was constructed entirely from NASA archives, and was part of a technology-inspired trilogy that the director created in response to the pandemic. The other titles in the trilogy are I AM HERE (2020) and Three Dialogues about the Future (2022). Alina Manolache contributes as a visiting lecturer in the MA Film program at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She has previously been an invited tutor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and at the Kassel Academy of Fine Arts. Her latest project is the feature documentary A Summer of Nothing, a personal film that addresses questions of identity, age, and change.