19/02/2024
Ramona has left us on the evening of this past Saturday, 17 February. After a short battle with cancer, with what seemed to be like limitless resources, the indefatigable Ramona had to go and rest for a little in a much better world, free of pain and suffering. This sad news is too terrible to countenance and we still expect her to wake up, full of vigour and energy after a good night’s sleep, and start working on her next project and hand us tasks and responsibilities.
Many people have contacted us since the news of her passing away became public, and we want to thank each and every one of you for your kind thoughts and words. Any future updates will be published here.
Ramona’s love story with culture – and especially Romanian culture – started early, and as she studied Letters and Languages and then Theatre Studies in 1990s Romania, this increased. After a number of scholarships abroad, Ramona started to work as Director of the Romanian Cultural Foundation, under the aegis of the great writer and cultural manager Augustin Buzura, leading to the crowning glory of the Gateway to Romania programme at Smithsonian Folklife Festival 1999. After this, Ramona became the cultural attaché of the Romanian Embassy in London, a position to which she brought her usual vibrancy and enthusiasm. Looking for a new challenge, in 2002 she started working as Director of the Ratiu Foundation and Romanian Cultural Centre in London. She began a 10-year period which witnessed the birth of numerous initiatives which were not only unique, but truly revolutionary at the time, bringing together the growing but disparate Romanian community in London. From meetings in a little function room of a pub in the City, to the entire upper floor of another, much bigger pub on Fleet Street – and then to the monthly events held on the ship HMS President. Little by little, Ramona managed to gain everyone’s trust, from the proverbial Romanian builders to the financial consultants and bankers, offering with unwavering constancy cultural products of the highest calibre, and becoming a source of trusted information to a number of London boroughs.
In the autumn of 2002, Ramona initiated a Romanian film club at The Other Cinema, an arthouse cinema on Rupert Street, offering both “classics” and new short films and features, falling in love with what later on became the Romanian New Wave of Cinema. This naturally led to the birth of the Romanian Film Festival in London, in October 2003. Twenty years and more than a hundred films later on, our Ramona was welcoming the guests of last year’s edition at the stylish Curzon Soho cinema in London’s West End, a stone throw away from Rupert Street.
As Director of the Ratiu Foundation from 2002 to 2012, Ramona was instrumental in securing scholarships and financing for hundreds of Romanian students in the UK, from the University of Kent and UCL to the London School of Economics and Oxbridge, and for scores of projects encouraging Romanian culture in both the UK and Romania.
In 2012, Ramona struck a path of her own, working exclusively for her company, Profusion International, which became the main organiser of the festival. In the meantime, she started publishing a handful of brand new translations of Romanian crime novels, and then a short story collection, a true crime book, and – her favourite – Augustin Buzura’s final novel. Out of this novel, working between many other commitments, Ramona extracted a dramatized one-man piece, Report of Love, which had its world premiere in London, on 25 June 2023.
A tireless organiser, a constant reader, a lover of poetry, and a passionate theatre goer, her achievements are too numerous to list here.
