In 2024, we take the archival strand of the festival in a new direction by focusing on the newsreel produced by the “Alexandru Sahia” documentary studio, for cinema distribution, between 1950 and 1974. 

 

News in Pictures followed on from the newsreels produced earlier in Romania, and prepared the ground for television news. The newsreels were produced and distributed weekly in cinemas across the country as an expression of the official political pedagogy of the state: they highlighted government policies and popular efforts, framed public issues, and forged new forms of visual communication in the process. The format of the newsreel evolved between the 1950s and the 1970s. The range of subjects increased, and their style and structure changed in response to the fluctuations of ideological pressure, as an expression of the professionalization of filmmakers, or as a reaction to the increased competition from the news programs produced by the national broadcaster TVR.

 

April 2024 marks fifty years since the production of the last newsreel at Sahia. We mark this anniversary with a first program of public screenings which, we hope, will inspire a public conversation about the legacy of the newsreel as a source of historical knowledge about a past that is increasingly less 'recent', but no less oppressive or disputed.

 

We would like to pay tribute to two esteemed film historians who passed away in the recent months, whose careers spanned decades spent in the service of the Romanian Film Archive (ANF): Aura Puran (1937-2023) and Bujor Râpeanu (1938-2024). We also express our gratitude to the ANF staff for their generous assistance in the process of developing our archival programs. 

 

SAHIA VINTAGE is curated by Adina Brădeanu.

 

In partnership with the National Film Centre and the National Film Archive.