Between the 15th and the 24th of March 2019, the 12th edition of One World Romania International Human Rights & Documentary Film Festival will take place in Bucharest.
The official trailer is made by Radu Jude. The video overlays audio fragments recorded during the 1989 Revolution onto contemporary images filmed at the military parade of the 1st of December 2018, thus suggesting an ambiguity between the two moments, between past and present. What and how much has changed in the past 30 years? How much has Romania evolved on the axis of democracy and rule of law? Have we reached past the transition and where are we heading? The director urges us to meditate on the central theme of this year’s edition – the passing of 30 years from the end of communist dictatorships and the beginning of democracy.
At the core of the selection – brought together this year by Andrei Rus and Vanina Vignal – is the section “After the Revolutions”. This thematic section includes 6 documentaries that will show us what the revolution meant in Yugoslavia, Syria, Uruguay, Libya or Russia, and what these turnarounds have changed in the lives of the people.
One of these six films is ”Unas preguntas / One Or Two Questions” by Kristina Konrad. In the Uruguay of year 1986, after 12 years of brutal military dictatorship, the society finds itself in a moment of confusion, from which those governing try to benefit as they initiate the idea of pardoning the criminals in the police and army forces: a law of amnesty which will confuse the population even more. In the tense climate of the period, two women take to the streets to film protests and interview passers-by, asking them about justice and peace. A compilation of archive coverages and period advertisements, “Unas preguntas” is the chronicle of a society split in two, segregated by waves of information manipulated by each of the two parts involved – those who ask for punishing the guilty and those who seek complete cover-up.
Another documentary we are looking forward to bringing to the audience is “Hotel Jugoslavija”, by Nicolas Wagnières. Starting from an investigation of his personal relationship with the past of Yugoslavia and the events that forced his family to leave into exile, the director analyses the particular history of Hotel Jugoslavia in Belgrad, and how the changes the building suffered reflect the changes Yugoslavia itself underwent after the Second World War. Built in 1969 by Tito and supposed to function as a symbol of the unshakable unity and fraternity between all the nations forming Yugoslavia at the time, the mythical projections of the hotel dissolve as did the concepts of the socialist utopia – which had believed that all the citizens of Yugoslavia would put aside their ethnic and cultural differences and would freely choose to remain in a new society, that they would build together.
