Studioul "Alexandru Sahia"

A more experimental aproach to labor protection films. In the line of Săucan's style, the soundtrack is as important as the image, the threatening music, full of shrillness, composed by Ion Dumitrescu potentiating the visual construction that mixes - in a montage reminiscent of the Soviet avant-garde school of the 1920s - all kinds of shooting techniques and frame combinations.

"This wonderful age in life where every thought strives toward an ideal, toward work, toward the future." Sahia Studios propaganda flick about how adults and their "those darn kids" attitudes affect adolescents.

A playful representation of the snobbery of communist middle class parents, for whom grades are more important than the real interest in their children's needs and curiosities.

Part of a series of promotional films commissioned by Romania's National Tourism Office in the early 1970s with the aim of reconnecting diasporic communities with the country they left behind. In this case, the film is addressed to Jews who emigrated in the context of the Second World War or were sold by the Romanian state to the State of Israel starting in the 50s and settled in Israel and the USA - therefore, a target group made up of seniors, probably retired , possibly prosperous, eager to revisit the places of youth and willing to forget, temporarily, the traumas associated with them.

In 1959, in Romania, six former members of the nomenclature and the secret police organize a hold up of the National Bank. After their arrest, the state forces them to play themselves in a film which reconstitutes the crime and the investigation. At the end of their trial, filmed live, they are sentenced to death and executed. except the women, Monica Sevianu that due to the fact that she had 2 children she was punished to do hard work for life.

An illustration of the evolution of the working conditions in the communist era, compared to the interwar period, using as a pretext a recently modernized factory in Jilava, presented in a mirror with the one described in a 1934 report by Geo Bogza.

Made on the occasion of March 8, it presents a series of brief portraits of women, from various professional fields, of different ages and even of different ethnicities, pointing out the benefits that the communist organization had brought to their daily lives. A special emphasis is placed on their status as mothers and on the role of nurseries and socialist kindergartens not only in making their lives easier, but also in giving them the time they need to build a career. Another concern of the filmmaker, starting from the concrete case of one of the protagonists, is to highlight the differences between the happy present and the not-too-distant past in which someone with her social status should have dedicated herself exclusively to raising children, in hygienic and extremely difficult lives.

A public service announcement condemning the ominous obstacle of social parasitism and delinquency amongst wayward youth unwilling to contribute to Romania’s socialist advancement.

Bearing the signature melancholy, affection, and absurdist irony of associative form that would define his filmography, Copel Moscu’s debut is a loving portrait of miners and their arduous, sun-deprived existence.

" Advertisement film for video games made by CENTROCOOP. "

Produced at the request of the Executive Committee of the People's Council of the capital, "Our Neighborhood" follows the story of a locomotive mechanic and his neighbors, recently assigned to the newly constructed buildings in Floreasca. Set against the backdrop of the emerging residential areas, the film's narrative structure retains the spirit of socialist realism but is strongly influenced by the optimism and cosmopolitanism of the 1960s. Accompanied by rhythmic swing tunes, we follow the characters of this documentary, representatives of the working class, both at their workplaces and in the new, bright and airy apartments, integrated into the logic and aesthetics of the new socialist neighborhood.

Director Eugenia Gutu offers a feminist critique of gender (in)equality under socialism in this documentary portrait of an industrializing town and its model citizen, Florica S.

The industrial site, the dam under construction and the colony of workers’ housing attached to them are among the favourite spaces of the Sahia documentary, especially during the last decade of the communist regime. The work on the country’s numerous industrial sites is a constant theme included in the annual Thematic Plans of the studio, therefore repeatedly fixed on film and repeatedly missed, or at least simplified by the documentaries of the time, always completed under the pressure of the political imperative.

Report from the Red Flag is an odd presence against the gloomy background of Stalinist Romania. It belongs to a wider body of Sahia films about the living conditions afforded by the new blocks of flats built across Romania – in this case, a workers’ quarter built in ‘Stalin’-town (the name assigned, between 1950 and 1960, to the Transylvanian town of Brasov). While other films bear the imprint of the collectivist, work-centered ethos of the time, Red Flag follows the workers during their downtime, between Saturday 3pm (the end of the working week) and Sunday evening, while they spend quality time with their families, walking, mountain climbing, biking, fishing, or shopping – an opportunity, today, to see candid images of relaxation shot at a time when the state started paying attention to the leisure and tourism facilities available to its citizens.

The gradual opening-up of Romania during the 1960s continued with the reorganisation, in 1972, of the national strategy for culture and tourism promotion, and the establishment, as part of the new Council for Culture and Socialist Education (CCES), of a special commission in charge of the national strategy for incoming foreign tourists. It was in this context that the National Tourrism Office (ONT) strategically commissioned, via its media arm Publiturism, a series of films meant to persuade various communities from the Romanian diaspora to spend their holidays – and their money – “back home” in Romania.

"This rediscovered film directed by Slavomir Popovici (under his Romanian name, Miron Slavu) was made on command of the Capital's Militsiya. The movie starts from the playful premise that two undisciplined pedestrians are in charge of the city's traffic. Popovici uses this opportunity to stage an anarchic choreography in the city's centre, the film being closer to an avant-garde study. Just like in The Plant, the director abandons linear dramaturgy and chooses to make a playful exercise, a cinematographic exploration of movement and space."

Banned for 20 years during the communist regime in Romania, this short film depicts New York City through the eyes of a director and a writer.

A documentary on the Fourth World Festival of Youth and Students that took place in the summer of 1953 in Bucharest.

"Filmed at "May the First" plant in Ploiești withe the occasion of the International Labor Day, The Plant is presented as a universe in itself, one which materialises the consubtantiality between social and technologic progress. Popovici felt his film must be a poem that can match the size of its subject. Thus, it became a juxtaposition of "cinematographic ideas related to one of the largest plants in the country". Inspired by soviet avant-garde, the director searches for a revolutionary aesthetic, one able to capture the rupture caused by the New Socialist Order. "

A bizarre mixture of unmasked propaganda for the apparent success of the collectivization process in Moldova with a fresh approach, sometimes extremely exciting, from a formal and narrative point of view.