ABOUT

Synopsis:

This movie introduces to the viewer the European Neolithic Cucuteni – Trypillian culture, one of the greatest cultures of painted ceramics, with emphasis on its symbols, their meanings, how they have been preserved, and the people who still incorporate those symbols in contemporary folklore, more or less aware of their origin and meaning. An emphasis in this film was placed on Mother Goddess symbols and how they transformed and were assimilated over the millennia, but still comprehensible in the modern folklore.
In the distant past, more than seven thousand years ago, on the actual Romanian territory, many cultures were developed, called by the archeologist with different names, as Vinca , Boian, Cernavoda, Cotofeni, Hamangia, Petresti, Gumelnita and Cucuteni-Trypilian culture. The last set forth is the most spectacular, impressing by its pottery, by the area occupied and by the periods it lasts for more than three millennia. The Cucuteni culture extending from the Carpathian Mountains to the Dnieper regions centered in a present-day around Moldova, western Ukraine, and northeastern Romania, south Poland as well. Cucuteni - Trypillian Culture is one of the greatest cultures of painted ceramics, which were decorated with symbols reflecting an awareness of cosmic and universal patterns (ca.6000 to 3500 BC).
But not only these aspects are defining for this Neolithic culture, but the facts discovered by the specialists, namely that it is the depository of a huge amount of artifacts and an enormously spiritual data consisting in symbols, which were deciphered or interpreted by scholars from different fields, as archeology, ethnography, philosophy, semiotics. The reason this documentary links the signs and symbols from seven thousand years ago with Romanian folklore is that they are still visible on the village houses, on the clothes, on the wooden gates or pillars, and many other objects from people houses. They lost the apotropaic meaning they had in the distant past, but they continue to be preserved for their esthetic function and because they are inherited from forefathers.