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Browse 43 movies from Studioul "Alexandru Sahia"
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.
Feb 1963
A compassionate portrait of a lonely old man’s attempt to reconnect with his estranged family is transformed into an investigative cinema verité procedural.
Mar 1966
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.
May 1960
"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. "
Jan 1963
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.
Jan 1982
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.
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.
Jan 1973
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.
Jan 1958
"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."
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.
Jan 1975
A documentary on the Fourth World Festival of Youth and Students that took place in the summer of 1953 in Bucharest.
May 1954
" A popularisation film, based on our researches and discoveries in the domain of the most advanced branch of technology, an attempt of clarifying the principles by which these strong helpers of men function, especially of how their "senses" systems work. "
Jun 1983
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.
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.
Jan 1981
" The "Electromotor" Timișoara enterprise presents the industrial robot "REMT 1" which replaces stereotypical and tiresome activities through a rhythmic and harmonious execution. This robot is mostly used for assembly purposes. "
Oct 1982
A movie about chickens and kids. The film was made in 1985, but screened only in 1990 for reasons that even Communist censors found hard to explain. A chicken farm that was very modern for its time included a kindergarten reserved for the employees’ children. The film uses the parallel between raising chicken and human babies as the starting point for a meditation on human nature.
Jan 1985
"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.
Jan 1969
"Fighting the Snow", which was subsequently also known as "Blizzard" represents a double feature, 6&7, of the "Actualitatea în Imagini" series. Directed by Mirel Ilieșu, it was filmed during the rough days of February 1954, when Romania faced a massive blizzard which targeted the capital city, eastern and south-eastern parts of the country, in three waves: 1-14, 17-19 and 22-24 of February. Part of the series made at "Alexandru Sahia" Studios. Awarded newsreel at Karlovy-Vary in 1954.
Jan 1954
“Cinema, Poetry, and Trains in Tîrgu Neamț” might serve as the subtitle for this film, which Copel Moscu composes in a deliberately atomised manner, capturing the rhythm of a small provincial town in late-1980s Romania: cinema as escapism, pouring rain à la George Bacovia, and a vague love story between a woman projectionist and a railwayman come one after the other over the course of this somewhat comical elegy, whose meanings do not achieve the poignant depths of Moscu’s other films.
Jan 1988