For Our Heirs, More Stories About Bucharest is a light-hearted snapshot of Bucharest at the beginning of the 1980s, presented as a letter addressed by “a group of citizens from the Alexandru Sahia studio” to the future residents of Bucharest in the 21st Century. Doru and Paula Segall visualize in absurdist fashion various (irrelevant) statistics available about life in Bucharest: “each inhabitant of Bucharest has available for himself the 500th part from a bus and almost 3 metres of pipeline… and we are ensured that, very soon, that will drop to 2 and a half”. That was possibly a hint to the way in which, at the time, figures and macro-reporting were preferred to micro-observation and to the real focus on the individual citizen. Humour was crucial for ensuring that film-makers could touch on sensitive aspects of daily life in the capital of Romania. To those in the know, an apparently innocent fragment of the film, such as one about being able to have a “Bucharest resident card” brings to mind the reality of the 1980s, when the state drastically limited the mobility of its citizens between the provinces and the capital and, as a consequence, the “Bucharest ID” became a form of hard currency for which people were ready to pay or get involved in fake marriages. The former employees at Sahia should have known that better than anybody else as, at the time, the studio provided work-places for many an offspring of the studio’s employees, in need of workplaces in the capital.

Three years after the Segalls’ film, Sahia’s Party secretary, Virgil Calotescu took his share of (professional) mobility – between Sahia and Buftea, the fiction film studio – and directed two comedies (Bucharest ID, 1983 and Repeated Wedding, 1985) inspired by the realities of the commerce with capital IDs, which had become rife at the time. The Segalls were also smiling while pointing their camera at a metropolitan population which was clearly not entirely adapted to urban, communal living, and was still raising chickens in the middle of the city, putting bee hives near the bus station and even managing, discreetly, to “fatten a pig or two in the shadows of their new apartment buildings”. Two decades before, their colleague Alexandru Boiangiu also took his camera to Bucharest’s new housing quarters and shamed those unable to preserve the property of the socialist state in a language that echoed the campaigns carried out by the Stalinist regime to isolate its aristocratic ‘others’: “we cannot remain indifferent to these types of bourgeois attitudes towards houses which belong to all of us”, commented the v.o. in Boiangiu’s film (Our House Like a Flower, 1963). In 1980, many Romanians still needed to make an effort to comply with the new rules of communal living, but with a smile on its face, Romania braced itself for the economy of subsistence.