The Costică Acsinte collection of studio photographs documenting almost seven decades of Romanian family life was rediscovered and scanned by Mario-Cezar Popescu and has become an object of nostalgic projection for a Romanian public eager to romanticize its past. But Director Radu Jude uses the Acsinte collection as visuals for a narrative constructed from archival sound and the personal diary of Doctor Emil Dorian, whose literary output was banned by the antisemitic regime of the early 1940s.

After a short preamble covering the first two decades after World War I and the creation of the so-called “Great Romania”, the story reconstructs the troubled period between 1937 and 1944 from fragments of “parallel lives,” in Jude’s own words: frames showing ordinary Romanians going about their ordinary private lives, against which we hear the soundtrack of political and historical horrors perpetrated against Jews and other targets of the Romanian authorities of the time. The friction between visuals, sound, and on-screen text works to reconstruct a missing picture of one of the most shameful episodes in Romania’s history, which is nearly absent from our own film archives or film history. Radu Jude presents an 85-minute long cut of this special project.

Speakeri: 

Andrei Gorzo, critic de film

Veronica Lazăr, critic de film

Adrian Cioflâncă, istoric