How is memory made? What remains of individual and collective stories? For this first work with and on archives, Ana Lungu takes us to Romania, mainly that of the Ceaucescu years. Initially, several image backgrounds, including one of her own family. What to do with this material, made in a context of political oppression? The family and private space, its secrets, their intricacies, will be the guide of this journey through time through the middle of the 20th century. But what can these images tell us? Certainly more and also possibly something other than what they show: between their very material and the off-screen that we guess, between the one who produced them and what they sometimes say against his will. In this oscillation, Ana Lungu, attentive but without fetishism, decides to redouble the fiction that they carry. Through the three moments selected – a child in the 1980s-90s, a music teacher from the 50s to the 80s (the communist era and its prohibitions), an aristocratic couple caught up in the Second World War – Merman takes us into the froth of these banal and unremarkable lives, into what they carry in terms of desires and fantasies (here a burning love, here the gaze of a father, there again the life of a bachelor), caught in the constraints and contradictions of their time as authors of the images. Ana Lungu breathes new life into these lives, reinvents them, in a dialectical movement questioning the false evidence of the story and the images. Between what we hear and what unfolds before our eyes, she only better restores their beauty, as well as the cruelty and violence of which they are alternately the sign or the tool.