In Ioana Mischie’s film Catane, twin girls weave their long red hair together into a single braid and squeeze themselves into one sweater to make it appear they are conjoined. Why would they do such a thing?

Well, it’s all part of a larger “conspiracy.” It seems the Romanian mountain village where they live has been pulling off a bit of a scheme. The handful of inhabitants all claim to live with physical or mental conditions of one kind or another – the better to enjoy government benefits.

Back in Bucharest, a red flag is raised among government officials. “All of the residents of Catane village claimed they have disabilities,” a functionary reports to his colleagues. Another responds, “What if it’s true?” Off they go to investigate.

Thus begins a comedy-romance that has been called “poetic, humorous and satirical” by Cineuropa. The feature – Mischie’s directorial debut – screened as the opening night film of the 21^st edition of SEEfest, the South East European Film Festival in Los Angeles.

“A lot of people in Romania said the film reminded them of Wes Anderson,” Mischie said at a Q&A after the screening. “Which is funny for me because I do feel it’s very local and it’s very different at the same time.”

Mischie spent years developing the project, encountering as many obstacles and bumps in the road as the inspectors as they drive up to the remote village of Catane.

“It took a decade to raise the money for it. Everyone rejected it at first,” the filmmaker explained. “We had a chance to do this project with some very big producers, but they wanted to turn it into a drama. So, I had to deny that. I was like, ‘We will try to do it the way we imagine.’ I’m very happy we stayed courageous because it’s a beautiful feeling to see the seeds of a story coming to life in the way that you envisage them.”

She added, “I feel we have a lot of dramas everywhere. It’s an overload of dramas. It’s an overload of traumas. And I think we need to find something to elevate us from the very low point where we are in.”

There’s a whimsical feel to the proceedings as the government inspectors arrive in Catane and begin to meet a curious array of villagers, among them an extremely myopic man who wears headgear fitted with magnifying lenses to help him see; a man who lost a limb and replaced it with an animal’s hoof; a couple that communicates only through head jerks and chirps; a woman with painful bubo-like growths on her legs, arms and back.

“It’s really a lovely fairytale, a gift to all of us,” commented SEEfest founder Vera Mijojlić, who moderated the Q&A with Mischie.

Commenting on the film’s tone, the director said, “I do come from Romania, which is a land of paradoxes. I did grow up in a countryside in a village that was very, very remote. And from there I collected a lot of spirituality, but also a lot of contrast. We have this word in the Romanian village — it’s called a face haz de necaz which means no matter how harsh reality is for you, you just make fun out of it. So, with that attitude, we somehow overcome anything, from really dreadful news to big, big disasters. So yeah, we are perfect in that.”

Mischie said thematically, the film “talks about, on one hand, the power of community. One of my dreams was to create the collective hero’s journey, not just the individual hero’s journey.”

She said it took a while to find her mountain setting, a bucolic if vertiginous location.

“We scouted for this village for more than a year. And the problem was a lot of Romanian villages got very modernized. So, they were full of plastic and hyper-modern stuff,” Mischie told the audience at the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills. “And a lot of other villages got depopulated completely. They had zero villagers in them. And finally, we found this place in the middle of Apuseni Mountains in Transylvania, in Alba County. All the villagers were just so warm with us. They made us feel like we are part of this big family… At the end of the shoot, we all wanted to move there.”

Mischie said she toyed with casting all non-professional actors. “I was thinking about going into a village, doing workshops with all the villagers for like one year and then filming in the next year, but then the production team told me ‘No, that’s not possible.’ So, ultimately, I got a chance to work with a brilliant casting director and also with some people in the village. The actors you see on screen are just brilliant Romanian actors. I hope they would have more opportunities to showcase their work. They are extremely versatile and they contributed a lot.”

Mischie’s script earned recognition at Berlinale Talents, the Sundance Workshop and other prestigious forums and won Best Script at Manaki Script Lab in North Macedonia and Fest Pitching Forum in Portugal. Catane was nominated for Best Original Score in the Independent Film (Foreign Language) category at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards, recognizing the work of composer Emiliano Mazzenga.

At the Q&A, Mazzenga discussed his collaboration with Mischie. “The idea was at first you use all the instruments that you could find actually in the village,” he explained. “The only exception was with what we call the ‘spiritual theme’ where we have all these beautiful shots of the mountains and I used some Indian music and then we used the same thing with Magda and Anton, the lovers theme, which we felt was right because it was subtle, creating this kind of magic. And that was one of the word that Ioana told me, like we want magic.”

Mazzenga said that feeling needed to extend to the investigators, who are mostly buttoned-up types. “We wanted to give this idea, even if they’re tax inspectors, that they’re actually going to an adventure and something magical.”

Catane has played theatrically in Romania. “We had 10,000 spectators so far with a very, very nice reaction, very moving reactions, I would say,” Mischie noted. As for the film being released theatrically in the U.S.?

“That’s the dream. If you know any distributor in the United States, we would be very happy to send the film to them,” the director said. “The film is now circling the festivals for probably one more year. Crossing fingers.”

SEEfest continues in Los Angeles through Wednesday, May 6.