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about us

Productive is about the people. Our services reflect the interests and abilities of the individuals that make up our team. We’ve always debated about the best way to promote the services we offer, all described under the generous term of communications. However, we recently realized that instead of trying to say it all, we should focus on our people and their skills. Here they are:

Iulia Măruşcă, director

Iulia has a degree in Communications from the University of Bucharest. Prior to Productive, she worked in advertising, without climbing the corporate ladder. In 2004 she proudly became an advertising industry drop-out and after a few months of soul searching and money predicaments, she had the fortune of running into a recent acquaintance, Rupert Wolfe Murray.

The two of them have been working together under the Productive banner ever since. Iulia’s responsibilities in the company include both challenging admin work (understanding the elaborate Romanian accounting system, keeping people happy with regular payments, finance coordination etc), as well as inspiring creative work (thinking up communication strategies, coordinating design and production jobs for various clients). Iulia’s aims for the future are to build up the company portfolio with clients and projects that make a difference (NGO, environment, social).


Rupert Wolfe Murray, producer and consultant

After graduating in history and politics from Liverpool University in 1985, Rupert Wolfe Murray went to Tibet where he taught English and wrote a travel book.  Subsequently he got into journalism and contributed to BBC Radio Scotland, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and won a trip to the Philippines as one of the winners of the Young Travel Writer of the Year Award (London Observer, 1989).

Rupert covered the Romanian revolution as a journalist and then got into humanitarian relief work in Romania and wartime Bosnia.  This led to the setting up of an NGO, which subsequently got amalgamated with Mercy Corps International. He subsequently worked in Kosovo and Albania for the International Rescue Committee.

Since 1999 Rupert has been working as a communications and management consultant in Romania, on donor funded projects on the Roma, child rights and regional development.  Together with Iulia Sebesan, he set up Productive International with the aim of providing communications solutions for public and private sector clients. Contact details: wolfemurray(at)gmail.com

Click here to see Rupert's online photo collection, or here to follow him on Twitter, or here to see him on Linked In


Laurenţiu Calciu, documentary filmmaker

Laurenţiu was born and bred in Bucharest. When the Revolution came he was a Math teacher. Soon after, he got hold of a VHS camera and started filming the new democracy emerging in the Bucharest streets in 1990. It was then that he met Rupert, who was in Romania as a journalist and aid worker.

Since capturing real life on film was obviously his passion, he decided to pursue it professionally and in 1991 was admitted to the National Film and School Television in UK, where he was awarded a Post Graduate Diploma in Documentary Filmmaking.

After graduating in 1995 he returned to Romania for a couple of years to teach documentary filmmaking and then in 1997 left for Greece, where he shot a documentary about life in the Dodecanese Islands, he spent and filmed months on a container ship that was sailing from Greece to Japan and made a documentary about the route of Jason and the Argonauts through the states on the coast of the Black Sea.

In Romania he made the award winning documentary “The Land is Waiting”, as well as several other short or full length documentaries about Roma life. He is very passionate about the Roma, their way of life and culture and has decided to study the Romani language.


Maria Farcaş, writer

After studies in languages and literature, Maria Farcaş quite accidentally stumbled into the tempting and deceiving field of advertising in which she never made a career. There followed a courageous resignation and three years of extensive traveling, sprinkled with writings about fascinating places, some soul-searching and occasional odd jobs in far-off countries.

Presently, Maria occupies herself with a variety of jobs within Productive, from article writing, translating and taking interviews to assisting the company’s director in researching documentary subjects. In parallel, she is involved in making the buzz around Rozalb de Mura, a new cutting edge Romanian fashion brand. Maria is also part of Liste Noire, an interior design group intent on beautifying spaces and adjusting them to the greatness of their owners. These days, Liste Noire was invited to convert a medieval tower in a monastery into a welcoming library.

Maria was never enthusiastic about making future plans and as it turned out they have often been viciously overthrown by a totally surprising reality. Nevertheless, she will definitely stick with the Productive team on their way to becomimg a well-known documentary film company. Glorious dreams surround Liste Noire, such as actually being paid for a project. The future vaguely includes some more extensive traveling and hopefully escaping the atrocious rental market of Bucharest.


Horia Măruşcă, film editor, graphic designer and photographer

Horia is all of the above mentioned but also none of them. No film school, no art school, no photography school. Horia does hold a degree in Journalism and Communication Studies at the University of Bucharest, where he learnt bits and pieces about… video editing, about photography, about design. Add a decent proportion of computer hardware and software literacy to the recipe and you’ll understand why Horia is always busy. If he’s not photographing horses in some remote Romanian village, then he is designing a leaflet or fine-cutting some documentary film.

A master degree in Media Management at the University of Bucharest in 1998 helped him better understand the Romanian media business and consequently he decided to work as a freelancer.

He is still doing that, happy to jump from a photo project to a graphic design job and then to a documentary film. He says that helps him keep his mind fresh and that would be perfectly true if most of his projects weren’t constantly overlapping.

Working on something mentally (and visually) stimulating is what Horia considers essential for getting up from the bed each morning with a smile. Something he managed to do till now, both personally and professionally, and he hopes to keep doing in the future.