Wild Romania

A documentary that exposes the shocking truths behind industrial food production and food wastage, focusing on fishing, livestock and crop farming. A must-see for anyone interested in the true cost of the food on their plate.

A deceptively simple set-up: the director and his father watch a 1988 football match which the father refereed, their commentary accompanying the original television images in real time. A Bucharest derby between the country’s leading teams, Dinamo and Steaua, taking place in heavy snow, one year before the revolution that toppled Ceaușescu.

Due to a pandemic, the Electric Castle music festival shifts into an intimate concert staged for cameras instead, with three bands and no live audience.

Poslední revoluce

In 1947, Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito visited, for the first time, Romania. Its communist regime gave him, as present, a painting from a great Romanian artist Ion Andeescu: 'The Leafless Forest'. In the 60s, a young art critic, Radu Bogdan, decided to elaborate a monograph dedicated to the great painter, including reproduction of the painting given to Tito. After countless problems, he obtained the permission to photograph the painting. The moment they took the painting off the wall, they found - a microphone. Somebody was spying on Tito...

1968, The Socialist Republic of Romania. Women catch up on the latest tendencies in beachwear, the young hippies of Hamburg are harshly criticized by Romanian students, while Nicolae Ceaușescu reads the famous defiance speech against the intervention of the Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia. Floating solemnly over all this is The Internationale, sung on a stadium by a crowd of pioneers dressed in white shirts and red ties. A certainty for each probability: the documentary is at the same time a history lesson and an ideological warning sign, the director’s endeavour permanently draws our attention to the functions of the propaganda film, yet without tarnishing the fascination that dwells in the core of the images, that of the figures that wave at us from a past buried in commonplaces and political parti pris.

A documentary portrait of legendary Perfect Ten gymnast Nadia Comaneci after becoming an icon in the 1976 Olympics, during her Romanian period, and her challenging years under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu.

A public service announcement condemning the ominous obstacle of social parasitism and delinquency amongst wayward youth unwilling to contribute to Romania’s socialist advancement.

A documentary-essay which shows Costică Axinte's stunning collection of pictures depicting a Romanian small town in the thirties and forties. The narration, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, tells the rising of the antisemitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust.

Procreation is the social duty of all fertile women, was the political thinking during the 1960s and 1970s in Romania. In 1966, Ceaucescu issued Decree 770, in which he forbade abortion for all women unless they were over forty or were already taking care of four children. All forms of contraception were totally banned. The New Romanian Man was born. By 1969, the country had a million babies more than the previous average. Romanian society was rapidly changing. By using very interesting archival footage and excerpts from old fiction films and by interviewing famous personalities from that time – gynecologists or mothers who were part of the new society - the director revives this period of tremendous oppression of personal freedom. Many deaths were caused by the mere fact that women, including wives of secret Romanian agents, famous TV presenters, and actresses, had to undergo illegal abortions. Many women were jailed for having them.

A look at what happened after Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was filmed in the Romanian village of Glod. It follows the life of one girl who longs to escape the poverty as foreign lawyers arrive with the promise of suing 20th Century Fox for millions of dollars.

Untamed Romania provides insight into the stunning natural wonders of Romania, with the Carpathian Mountains, the Danube Delta, and Transylvania as its major areas of interest.

A film about the artist Daniel Spoerri. It's actually a film about a thought by Daniel Spoerri: a film almost without Daniel Spoerri, it's actually mostly acted out by a child - to say no less than that everything somehow goes on in life, even if you die in between.

Made on the occasion of March 8, it presents a series of brief portraits of women, from various professional fields, of different ages and even of different ethnicities, pointing out the benefits that the communist organization had brought to their daily lives. A special emphasis is placed on their status as mothers and on the role of nurseries and socialist kindergartens not only in making their lives easier, but also in giving them the time they need to build a career. Another concern of the filmmaker, starting from the concrete case of one of the protagonists, is to highlight the differences between the happy present and the not-too-distant past in which someone with her social status should have dedicated herself exclusively to raising children, in hygienic and extremely difficult lives.

A more experimental aproach to labor protection films. In the line of Săucan's style, the soundtrack is as important as the image, the threatening music, full of shrillness, composed by Ion Dumitrescu potentiating the visual construction that mixes - in a montage reminiscent of the Soviet avant-garde school of the 1920s - all kinds of shooting techniques and frame combinations.

The film's protagonists are the orphaned children taken into custody by the state and institutionalized at Children's House no. 6 from Bucharest. For Mészáros, the concern for the situation of children left orphaned during the Second World War is autobiographical: the director directly experienced the absence of parents in her own childhood.

At the beginning of the 70s, Sahia Studio produced a number of social investigations commissioned by the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, intended to expose the so-called "social parasitism". The decision was taken after the theses of July 1971, which provide that "one of the main objectives of political work, especially among the youth, is the firm fight against the tendencies of parasitism, of an easy life, without work, the cultivation of responsibility and the duty to work , in the service of the country, the people, the socialist society". The most famous films, made with the competition of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice, are Să treacă vara and Iarna unor pierde vară

The last days of the first Romanian king, Carol I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, and the tough decisions he had to make in the summer of 1914 in order to please both Romanian Parliament and his relatives from the German Empire.

The three-hour-long documentary covers 25 years in the life of Nicolae Ceaușescu and was made using 1,000 hours of original footage from the National Archives of Romania.

In Iasi, Romania, from June 28 to July 6, 1941, nearly 15 000 Jews were murdered in the course of a horrifying pogrom. At the time, the programmed extermination of European Jews had not yet began. After the war, the successive communist governments did all they could to ensure the Iasi pogrom would be forgotten. It was not until November of 2004 that Romania recognized for the first time its direct responsibility in the pogrom. All that remains of this massacre are about a hundred photographs taken as souvenirs by german and romanian soldiers, and a few remaining survivors.