Timelines

Mona Nicoara
7 min readApr 15, 2021

I am a documentary filmmaker, which means I make sense of reality by arranging disparate bits of footage into linear stories. Since the pandemic hit, the whole world got to learn my trade: in isolation, we all make do with clips of the outside world on small screens, daring us to turn them into scenes, sequences, stories. It’s been a disorienting job for most.

The last time I watched something together with my parents was January 6th. “Together” — whatever the word has come to mean over the past nine months: holed up in our own homes on two different continents, sharing images on screens. We saw what everyone else saw: a crowd dotted with red MAGA caps and blue Trump campaign flags push through the doors of the Capitol. We saw people seemingly engaged in cosplay taking selfies in the rotunda while filing diligently through velvet ropes like tourists. We heard of a death, off screen. We heard of a noose, also off screen. CNN only had a few angles, a few disjointed images. Live, they did not amount to a narrative, just a fragmented experience that seemed to unfold in slow motion — the kind that makes everything more visible but less understandable.

We have only one channel to share, me in New York and my parents in Romania: CNN. I had turned my mother on to CNN in mid-2020, after I realized that Romanian television had her convinced that all of America was on fire 24/7. She, who had come into the streets with me during the 1989 Revolution, was now afraid that, in my turn, I was taking her grandchildren onto the burning barricades of the Black Lives Matter movement. She does not speak English, but on CNN she was able to see images of the protests as we were experiencing them in the streets: determined, cautious, generous, even joyful at times. It helped calm her, and it helped keep her connected. She would call to ask for clarifications: is “outraged” (“aaautrahgeyd,” she said it with outsize care) the same as the Romanian “ultragiat”?

A couple of days before the New Year, she called me in a panic: she had seen on CNN that Trump was summoning his supporters to DC on January 6th. She feared he would stage a coup. I reassured her from my Brooklyn backyard: the last few times Trump supporters held a protest in DC barely anyone showed up. I turned out to be wrong; she turned out to be right.

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Mona Nicoara

Documentary filmmaker, curator, educator, relapsing activist, opportunistic writer. Most of the pieces I have on here were published elsewhere first.