Romanian students are taught that accepting sexual advances is a moral obligation, and suicide a way to solve one’s issues, claims an association that campaigns for “defending, promoting and strengthening the rights of parents in Romania”. It all started when the students of the “Scoala Centrala” National College in Bucharest, as part of an extracurricular activity developed in partnership with the French Institute, watched a film that focuses on the friendship between two teenagers faced with age-specific challenges.
On the route Europe - Gayropa, via Moscow
NEWS: “The Romanian Parents’ Alliance became aware of the fact that, on February 13 and 15, 2023, the 7th and 8th graders were taken to watch the movie Close, as an educational activity, carried out in partnership with French Institute. The film explicitly promotes the LGBT way of life, and the explanations given by the educational unit in response to the parents' reaction represent an embarrassing attempt to justify the training of children in an activity whose educational messages can be summarized as follows:
1-“if a person of the same sex makes advances to you, i.e. shows a 'romantic interest' towards you, you must respond to those advances, because otherwise that person will commit suicide, and you will feel guilty”
2-“suicide is a means of solving one’s issues”
NARRATIVE: LGBT propaganda in the Romanian school is aimed at changing the natural sexual orientation of children.
CONTEXT: The morally degenerate West, which has deviated from Christian values, is one of the main narratives of Moscow's propaganda war against the EU and NATO, intensified to its maximum along with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Topics related to the LGBT community have been used for years in attempts to discredit the European cultural space. Thus, the EU is presented as “Gayropa”, a space in antithesis to that of traditional, Christian, Orthodox values, which Russia allegedly represents. More often than not, homosexuality and pedophilia are presented as practically the same thing, in order to convince the public that, by promoting equality in relation to sexual orientation, the aim is actually to legalize pedophilia. Thus, the idea of an “LGBT agenda” is induced, which the EU would try to impose by force. Messages are then picked up by local “spokespeople” and adapted to the specifics of each targeted country.
However, similar narratives are also promoted in the area of the Western radical right; some of it, but not all, has also been cultivated by Russia.
In Romania, the strongest voice carrying the narrative was the Coalition for Family, an association of several NGOs, foundations and associations, many of which focus on the promotion of traditional Christian values (the “Parents for the Religion Class” Association, the “Vladimir Ghika” Association of Catholic Families, the Association of Romanian Orthodox Christian Students, the “Christiana” Medical-Christian Philanthropic Association, the Father Arsenie Boca Christian Foundation, the Foundation of the Holy Brincoveanu Martyrs, the Romanian Orthodox Youth Association, the “Orthodox Places” Association, etc.). Because of the resounding failure of the main initiative of this coalition, namely to amend article 48 of the Romanian Constitution, most of these organizations have regrouped under another name, the Together Platform, and one of the message carriers of the new coalition became the Parents' Alliance, an NGO established in 2016, known in recent years especially for the protests it organized during the pandemic and for taking an anti-vaccine and anti-abortion stand.
In the middle of last month, several students of the “Scoala Centrala” National College in Bucharest watched the movie “Close”, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, an event that gave rise to a revolt from some of the students’ parents. The reason is that the theme and message of the film by the Belgian director Lukas Dhont is considered by them to be, in fact, more or less disguised propaganda for the “LGBT way of life”.
Following this move, the Parents' Alliance addressed an open letter to the school management, by means of which, dissatisfied with the response received to an initial petition, it requests more documents to be used “in our future criminal proceedings (Art. 197 Penal Code: Ill treatment applied to the minor), considering that by watching this film that promotes juvenile homosexuality and incites suicide, our children have been subjected to psychological aggression and trauma.” At the same time, representatives of the association and parents organized a protest in front of the college.
PURPOSE: To increase homophobic sentiments, to trigger anti-system social movements, to promote the introduction of ultra-religious and ultra-conservative propaganda into the educational system.
Boy friendship and homosexual propaganda
WHY THE NARRATIVE IS FALSE: The movie Close is far from explicitly promoting an LGBT way of life, and it categorically does not present suicide as a solution to resolving one’s issues. Although we are talking about an artistic act, where the interpretation of its message is extremely subjective, we cannot ignore the opinions of specialists in the field: Thomas Rogers, a well-known film and literature journalist contributor to several publications, such as the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek, New York Magazine, etc., describes “Close” as a slow-burning drama about two 13-year-old boys named Léo and Rémi, whose close bond triggers a revisionist backlash from one of them when classmates suspect they are a couple. After that, Léo, angry, begins to distance himself from Rémi, and a series of disappointments turns to tragedy.
Jake Coyle, a renowned screenwriter and film critic, says of “Close” that it is a film about “a friendship between two 13-year-old boys, Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele), whose tender intimacy is tested, tragically, when Léo, seeking to fit in with other, more macho boys, pushes Rémi away.” And the acclaimed film critic Peter Bradshaw sees the film as “a heartbreaking tale of boyhood friendship turned sour”.
Obviously, the author of these lines has their own interpretation of the film, but the important thing is to discuss facts now, not ideas or feelings. We can't do that without narrating the movie, though, so we're doing the proper SPOILER ALERT here.
So, the only hints at the sexual orientation of the two main characters are the ones that actually trigger the rift between them and set the film in motion. They are spoken in an interrogative form, and although Rémi's silence and the looks he gives Léo when he vehemently denies it can be interpreted as an affirmative answer, this is by no means an example of explicit promotion. The reasons for Rémi's suicide remain unexplained throughout the film, although Léo and the viewer suspect them. Regardless, his tragic demise doesn't solve any problem and certainly isn't presented as a viable solution.
Léo, although tormented by remorse, carries on with his life, with other friends and family, and even finds the courage to confess his thoughts to Rémi's mother, who unsurprisingly embraces him and offers him support. Moreover, at the end of the film we discover that even Rémi's parents move on, starting over in another place though, still missing their lost child. In fact, the film is more about bullying and its extreme consequences, as it is precisely the students’ homophobic jokes and remarks that cause the break between the two friends. Then, as the film's director himself stated, “Close” talks about responsibility and the inability to make decisions that are too big at an age when one is still searching, and the desire to be accepted by peers far surpasses other adolescent experiences.
We talked on the phone with teacher Olimpia Popa, Director of the Education - Health Department of the Parents' Alliance, in order to better understand how the members of the association reached the conclusions stated in the letter addressed to the “Scoala centrala” College. Unfortunately, a few minutes after the start of the dialogue, the teacher refused to continue it, stating that “we are not even remotely part of the same family of spirits”. Furthermore, she requested that we don’t even quote the beginning of the dialogue, so, honorably, as promised, we will not.
We also tried to talk to someone from the school’s management, but no one answered when we dialed the number displayed on the institution's website. We only had at our disposal the official statement issued after the initial requests of the Parents' Alliance, in which it is specified that only the students who expressed their intention to do so voluntarily participated in the event, as well as the fact that the main themes of the film, as we ourselves argued earlier, are specifically related to adolescence, such as friendship, relationships between peers, bullying, etc.
In conclusion, although it is very likely that the character Rémi in the film in question was a homosexual, this is by no means explicitly stated in the film and in no way can be considered propaganda. By this principle, any film with mobsters would mean pro-crime propaganda. Likewise, Rémi's suicide and the pain his friend feels afterward cannot be considered an invitation to suicide, any more than a film about revenge can be classified as pro-killing propaganda.
Finally, we will only mention the disinformation with which the letter ends, proof that, as in many other cases, the arguments used in conservative actions are mere speculations, distortions of reality or subjective interpretations: “the two tragic and sudden deaths of two transvestites (therefore from the “LGBTQ+” category) who committed suicide following crises and disappointments similar to those of the suicidal character in the movie Close”, from December 2022, in the city of Iași, were actually caused, in one of the cases, by a pulmonary edema, and in the other, most likely, by carbon monoxide poisoning following an accidental fire.
GRAIN OF TRUTH: At the 2022Cannes Film Festival, “Close” was nominated, among other things, in the Queer Palm category, a category that awards films from the genre of Queer cinema, in which the subject is related to the LGBTQ community, which is why, very often, these films give rise to controversy.
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