In 2021, Dan Dinu and Cosmin Dumitrache released a documentary about Romania’s nature and wildlife. Wild Romania features never-seen-before images of the country’s most spectacular regions. We asked photographer and director Dan Dinu a few questions about Romania and the documentary.

Can you tell us something about Romania?

Romania is a beautiful country that’s still quite wild. There are many untouched areas and there is much biodiversity. We have the Carpathian Mountains with pristine forests, the Danube Delta, which is the biggest wetland in Europe, and the Black Sea. Those three areas make for very diverse landscapes. But Romania also has the largest concentration of big carnivores, like wild bears and wolves, in the European Union!

Why did you decide to make a documentary about nature in Romania?

It actually started as a photography project in 2010. I wanted to visit all the national parks in Romania to make a photo collection and donate the pictures to the park administration and environmental NGOs so that they would have more material to promote their work. After two or three years, my colleague, who is a videographer, had the idea to make a movie and I agreed. We started making small series and short documentaries for NGOs, and in 2018, we decided to make a big movie – Wild Romania! That’s how it started, the idea grew step by step.

Can you tell us something about Wild Romania and how you made the documentary?

The idea was to make the movie like a journey where you discover parts of Romania little by little. There are many short stories about animals in it, but they’re all connected by the landscapes, the areas and other animals. Everything in the documentary is connected – that was the main idea.

It wasn’t easy to film the wildlife. I think Romania is one of the toughest countries to film wildlife in Europe. The wild places are very big, and the animals are really afraid of people. We used camera traps to get a shot of wolves, for example. We did this over a period of two years and only managed to put five minutes of that footage in the film! But it wasn’t all this difficult – filming the bears went much smoother, for example.

What will your next movie be?

The next movie will be about the Danube Delta. We want to focus on that area because it’s spectacular!

Would you like to see Wild Romania? Check out the documentary and photo book on the links below:

Documentary trailer: https://vimeo.com/629878072

Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWzRnU-uBCQ

Photo book: https://www.nhbs.com/wild-romania-romania-slbatic-book