In the national-communist imagination, workers and documentary filmmakers walked side by side. They shared an onerous position assigned to them as part of the official discourse of the one-party state: the workers were a crucial component of the social and political mechanism, since they were allegedly the class, fully aware of its historical role, on behalf of which the Party ruled; the documentary filmmakers also enjoyed the official limelight, being that privileged category of cinema workers tasked with depicting the country’s revolutionary present and, not least, the workers themselves. The films included here have in common an emphasis on the semantic family of ‘work’: work construed as alienating or liberating, work as a process, the refusal to work, the cult of work, efficient vs. inefficient work, work and time, work and female emancipation, gendered work, the poetry of work, etc. 

The program complements the selection included on the DVD VINTAGE SAHIA II: Work which will be launched during the festival.

One Minute (Ion Bostan, 1949, 16’) 
The Tanners (Mirel Iliesiu, 1963, 10’)
Let the Summer Pass (Florica Holban, 1972, 10’)
The Night of the Men (Alexandru Boiangiu, 1972, 10’) 
The Diary of Florica S (Eugenia Gutu, 1975, 10’)
The Miners (Ion Visu, 1978, 11’)
A Team of Young Men and The Others (Ada Pistiner, 1976, 11’)
The Youth Factory (Adrian Sirbu, 1986, 9’)

The films included in this program are the cultural products of a far-left totalitarian regime which has conceived them as political propaganda tools. This screening is organised solely for educational purposes, with no propagandistic intention. (The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile)