Romania, 1989. The twilight of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. In a small, isolated town, Maria, a ten-year-old girl, is the last person to witness her sister disappearing before her eyes. Torn apart by the loss, she tries to make sense of a new, terrifying reality. Can she summon the courage to grow up?

Venice Film Festival 2025 - Orizzonti

Director & Screenwriter Mihai Mincan Cast Emma Ioana Mogos, Marina Palii, Igor Babiac, Istvan Teglas Cinematographer George Chiper-Lillemark Editor Dragoș Apetri Costume Designer Dana Păpăruz Music Marius Leftărache, Nicolas Becker Sound Nicolas Becker, Cyril Holtz, Benjamin Laurent, Ange Hubert, Frédéric Dabo Visual Effects Copenhagen Visual Producers deFilm (Radu Stancu, Ioana Lascăr), Remora Films (Cyriac Auriol) Ström Pictures (Monica Hellström), StudioBauhaus (Konstantinos Vassilaros), Screening Emotions (Poli Angelova, Nikolay Todorov) Year 2025 Category Fiction Language Romanian Run time 104' Original Title Dinți de lapte Sound format 5.1

The first image of Dinți de lapte came to me in 2019: a young girl listening in total silence, her right ear pressed against a cement wall. It was a dream, one of many I began having after reading a Romanian Communist Militia file from 1989, about the disappearance of an eleven-year-old girl from a small town. I wanted to make a film about a kind of muteness — the inability to articulate or describe in words an inner universe constantly on the verge of bursting into flames. Over the years, I twisted and changed this idea several times, somehow trying to find the film’s own “voice”. It became a coming-of-age story about the aftermath of a tragedy — a film about a young girl who tries to make sense of a confusing and cruel world that suddenly opens up before her eyes.
Caught between two dimensions — reality and fantasy, political oppression and the rise of the so-called “new world” at the beginning of the 1990s — this little girl represents the “lost generation of children”, the same generation I belong to. The children who believed in freedom, only to discover that our voices would not be heard by anyone.
This is how Dinți de lapte became what it is now: a film that chooses not to speak directly about a child struck by muteness, but about someone who gathers words in her mind, waiting for the right moment to shout them out to the entire world.

“Elusive, troubling and densely-crafted both visually and sonically, Milk Teeth is not quite like any film we have yet seen from contemporary Romanian cinema.” 
SCREEN

“A sophomore effort that should travel far and wide based on the recent pedigree of Romanian cinema, as well as its ability to tick multiple boxes (historical context, genre elements, a carefully judged performance by the very young lead actress).”
THE FILM VERDICT

“Milk Teeth suggests that what is tender could be temporary and easily lost. Buoyed by strong visuals, this sophomore film describes fear on a different plane—not overt oppression or transgressions, but a stinging indifference, making for an engrossing triple-layered look into painful transitions.”
ION CINEMA

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