To acquire the Austrian citizenship, all other citizenships must be renounced. How does it feel to erase your own citizenship, even if at its core it’s just a piece of paper? Filmmaker Cristi Iorga seems unfazed. “It must be a Romanian thing, not wanting to be Romanian,” he ponders.

In Austria, the second-biggest community by nationality is the Romanian one, ranking just behind Germany. But few people seem to know this, as the community is rarely visible in public. The film “The Unproud Nation” tries to capture captures the moments when they do appear “in the wild”: during presidential elections, when Romanians line up in huge queues at the embassy, and during Easter Mass, when a crowd gathers in front of the Orthodox church at midnight, holding candles. The filmmaker is among them, candle in hand. He does not hide behind the camera, nor does he seek to provoke—he simply tries to start conversations within the community.

There are plenty of places for this: the three Romanian restaurants or the dozen Romanian supermarkets, for example. He shares symbols from his homeland with the audience—the national epic about a frustratingly resigned shepherd or the national anthem that begins with the urgent call, “Wake up, Romanian!”

Through the filmmaker’s family, “The Unproud Nation” lets the viewers in on the psychology of a nation—on an individual and personal level. The father states that he was born in the wrong country because he must have done something bad in a prior life to end up here. The mother doesn’t really hate her country but advises her son to find a rich Austrian girl, of whom she is sure there are plenty alone in their villas. Through his parents, we get a glimpse of Romania before the filmmaker’s birth: a communist dictatorship marked by oppression and hunger, a regime that triggered the “brain drain” as soon as the borders opened in ’89. And yet: if things were so bad, why didn’t his parents leave when they had the chance?

“The Unproud Nation” approaches themes of nationality and identity with humor and self-irony. It embraces the wealth of contradictions that it finds: a nation that is proud of not being proud and parents that love their only son so much they want him to leave.