Skip to main content
Milk Teeth film image; serious-looking young girl in a white beret

Milk Teeth

Dinți de lapte

Free Event | Vancouver Romanian Film Festival

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

Free screening. Advance booking is recommended.

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. It combines the everyday realism associated with Romania’s New Wave cinema with an imagistic, sometimes hallucinatory style evoking the intensity of childhood perception. It’s also a depiction of a very specific moment — the time immediately prior to the fall of the Ceausescu regime, its young heroine representing Romania’s so-called ’lost generation’ of children.

Jonathan Romney, Screen International

Loaded with atmosphere and allegory, Mincan crafts a superb coming-of-age story that eloquently tackles a generational zeitgeist of 1980s Romania.

Andrew Murray, The Upcoming

Director

Mihai Mincan

Cast

Emma Ioana Mogoş, Marina Palii, Igor Babiac, Istvàn Téglás

Credits
Country of Origin

Romania

Year

2025

Language

In Romanian with English subtitles

19+
104 min

Book Tickets

Wednesday December 03

6:15 pm
Free Event Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Book Now

Credits

Producer

Radu Stancu, Ioana Lascar, Cyriac Auriol, Monica Hellström, Konstantinos Vassilaros, Poli Angelova

Screenwriter

Mihai Mincan

Cinematography

George Chiper Lillemark

Editor

Dragos Apetri

Original Music

Marius Leftarache, Nicolas Becker

Production Design

Anamaria Tecu

Also in This Series

Free screenings showcasing seven of the best Romanian films from the last couple of years.

The New Year That Never Came

Dir. Bogdan Mureşanu
138 min

Bogdan Mureşanu’s polyphonic tragi-comedy tracks six interconnected stories to capture the mood in Romania on the brink of revolution in 1989.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Traffic

Dir. Teodora Mihai
119 min

Natalia and Ginel leave their small Romanian Danube village to work abroad in a big Flemish city. One evening, when she is assaulted after meeting a local, Natalia asks Iță, a friend from home turned into a crook, to help her.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Box of Freedom

Dir. Adelina Șuvagău
86 min

Escaping post-Communist Romania in a cargo ship's container bound for Canada, comedian Dora writes and performs new comedic material to the other two passengers in the container.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Milk Teeth

Dir. Mihai Mincan
104 min

Romania, 1989. The twilight of Nicolae Ceaușescu's dictatorship. In a small, isolated town, Maria, a ten-year-old girl, becomes the last witness to her sister's mysterious disappearance.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Tata

Dir. Lina Vdovîi & Radu Ciorniciuc
82 min

In this gripping documentary, filmmaker Lina Vdovii responds to her abusive father's plea for help -- a migrant worker in Italy who is being exploited by his employer.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema