A British Romanian filmmaker guides a mutual search for identity, enlists actresses to stand in for a mother and insists on a trauma-informed approach
Something familiar is the debut feature from British Romanian director Rachel Taparjan, who also appears on camera as one of the film’s central figures. A senior lecturer in social work at Teesside University, Taparjan brings academic sensibility to a personal investigation that moves between memory, family secrecy and the practicalities of filmmaking. The film unfolds as a shared journey: she helps a woman named Mihaela search for her birth mother in Romania and, in the process, is pulled into the shadows of her own family history.
The film will world premiere in the main competition of the 23rd edition of CPH:DOX on Tuesday, March 17. Its narrative blends footage of the trip to the orphanage where both women were adopted with staged conversations in which actresses occupy the role of a missing mother. This hybrid structure asks whether creative form can be a way to practice self-authorship and to reshape what has always felt inevitable.
Taparjan deliberately takes on two roles: director and subject. That dual position creates ongoing tensions about control, disclosure and reliability. She has described the experience as trying to be a reliable narrator while also grappling with personal strategies that kept her safe over the years. The film therefore leans into a hybrid documentary approach to open up different modes of truth-telling: observational moments sit alongside staged encounters and performed scenes. Those choices are not decorative; they are a practical answer to the problem of how to represent complicated interior lives on screen.
One of the film’s most striking devices is the use of actresses to sit opposite Taparjan as possible mothers. That gambit reframes absence as something negotiable rather than immutable. For adopted people, imagining multiple maternal figures is a familiar mental habit; Taparjan turns that habit into a cinematic device. She also sought to reclaim the maternal archetype she lacked by inviting different feminine energies into the frame. The staged interviews and the formal swap of roles offer both a rehearsal for intimacy and a way to test how narratives shift when you transgress documentary conventions.
At its heart, Something familiar is a study of intergenerational pain. The film asks how trauma moves through families and how social labels—especially the shorthand of “Romanian orphan”—can stigmatize people long after the facts are known. Taparjan interrogates how Western media portrayals have often flattened complex social realities into a white-savior script, and she resists those tropes by practicing a more playful, poetic storytelling method. The result is not denial of suffering but an attempt to translate it into something bearable and generative.
Ethical practice was central to the shoot. Taparjan insisted on a trauma-informed practice throughout production and worked with a psychological consultant and a qualified therapist at different stages. Here trauma-informed practice is used as an operational concept: it means creating processes that acknowledge past harm, prioritize consent, and provide aftercare for participants. She also experimented with giving agency back to contributors by literally letting them direct parts of the conversation, swapping seats so that a sister or subject could assume the director’s role and ask the questions they needed to ask.
The film is a Romanian-British co-production produced by Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan and Elena Martin of Manifest Film and Aleksandra Bilic of My Accomplice, with Dermot O’Dempsey credited as co-producer in association with Shudder Films. Cinematography was led by Andrei Oană, editing by Alice Powell, and international sales are handled by Stranger Films Sales. Before its CPH:DOX premiere, the project was showcased at Presented at Cannes Docs as part of the 2026 docs-in-progress program and received the Chicken & Egg Vision Award, recognition that helped shape its post-production path.
For audiences and programmers, the film offers both an intimate family portrait and a model for how documentary can combine care, creativity and critical inquiry. By refusing easy villains and by foregrounding participant wellbeing, Taparjan positions the film as an example of how cinema can reframe inherited narratives rather than merely repeat them.