ICON production

The life and death of socialist architectural monsters. An epic fairy-tale in five chapters.

Every year Mihai carries his motorcycle in his tenth floor apartment during the winter and bring it back downstairs in spring with the help of his friends. But this year Mihai finds out how fragile friendships can become.

Cristina, a mid 30s secretary living in an alienating and hostile Bucharest, is trying to understand what it means being a bills-paying, ready-to-settle, social-ladder-climbing adult while still desperately wanting to be a good child for the single mom that raised her. She is also a character in a novel that a theatre director is turning into a feature. As the actors start setting into the story, their individual backgrounds, social circumstances and personal motivations begin to overlap with the fiction they were offered, making it their own, questioning it and shaping it. The result is what it’s supposed to be: a playful mesh of perceived reality and fabrication.

A couple of weeks after his wife Ioana dies in a car crash, drunk and alone on the night he turns 42, Alexandru receives a visit. Sebastian, a shy, younger man, has been Ioana's lover for the past five months. Sebastian has an outrageous request: he wants Alexandru to help him overcome the despair caused by Ioana's death.

1968, The Socialist Republic of Romania. Women catch up on the latest tendencies in beachwear, the young hippies of Hamburg are harshly criticized by Romanian students, while Nicolae Ceaușescu reads the famous defiance speech against the intervention of the Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia. Floating solemnly over all this is The Internationale, sung on a stadium by a crowd of pioneers dressed in white shirts and red ties. A certainty for each probability: the documentary is at the same time a history lesson and an ideological warning sign, the director’s endeavour permanently draws our attention to the functions of the propaganda film, yet without tarnishing the fascination that dwells in the core of the images, that of the figures that wave at us from a past buried in commonplaces and political parti pris.

A young Romanian gendarme, Cristi, tries to find the balance between two apparently opposing parts of his identity: that of a man working in a macho hierarchical environment and that of a closeted gay person who tries to keep his personal life a secret. Cristi is called in for an intervention at a movie theatre, where an ultra-nationalist, homophobic group has interrupted the screening of a queer film. After one of the protesters threatens to out him, Cristi spirals out of control.

How did the Romanian authorities carry on the murders of thousand of jews at Iași? This documentary follows the 1941 pogrom through photographs and confessions of the survivors.

The three-hour-long documentary covers 25 years in the life of Nicolae Ceaușescu and was made using 1,000 hours of original footage from the National Archives of Romania.

A scholar of mathematics would like to publish his research outside Ceaucescu's Romania, but getting it through the border and the State censorship is not easy.