Filmed in six countries during fifteen years , "The Last Transhumance" takes us into the world of shepherds who walk with their animals very long distances in search for food: an ancient way of life not compatible with the modern world.
The film confronts the reality of cultural displacement and the search for identity, framed by my family’s own longing for the Romanian culture, absent in American surroundings. There Are No Fir Trees Here is a story about the spaces we inhabit and the yearning for a place that feels like home.
The Resocializing Center at the Neuropsychiatry Hospital 'Alexandru Obregia' is a more or less Utopian attempt to reinstate the mentally ill back into the 'system', into society. Beyond the succes or the failure of this attempt, the emotional memory keeps the inner poetry of some personal worlds - as a way to survive in a chaotic and absurd reality - and, in the end, the relativity of the 'normality' concept.
Multiple kinds of "judicial experiments" (re-enactments) are presented, their purposes and procedures being revealed throughout the film.
The road through Stremt ends in a mountain wall. Still, in 1989 people were eagerly awaiting army tanks, terrorists and glory. Today, though partly forgotten, partly imagined, the past is crystal clear.
Music video for the band Șuie Paparude
25 years after her parents' wedding, a filmmaker discovers the VHS recording of the event. By watching and rewatching the images, she tries to discover more about her family, but eventually finds herself trapped in a world of hidden memories.
A small part of Ion Tarara's photographic archive is put in sentimental order by his daughter, on which occasion she rethinks the poetics of archivism.
"VUNK - I swear to tell the truth" is the first documentary of a band from Romania. Tracing the history of one of the most beloved rock bands of recent decades, the documentary surprises VUNK fans with new images and stories, starting with their participation in "Singing Romania" in 1988 and continuing with key moments in the 90s, when the band was still performing under the name Vank.
In December 1955, the professional community around Sahia celebrate the fifth anniversary of their institution by producing this films meant to be screened in the opening of the anniversary party and only for insiders of the studio. The film copy available at the National Film Archive has no credits therefore we cannot be specific about the type of involvement of each member of the studio in the making of this film.
A look at Romania's increasing mechanization in the seventies told from the perspective of a wanderer.
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 Segalls’ interest in children’s lives dated from the mid-1960s, when, using a camera placed off-stage, they filmed the end of the year festivities at their daughter’s nursery. The result was Big Little Feelings, which won the Silver Dove at the Leipzig Festival in 1964. In the years that followed, the idea of including their own child in some of their films did not sit well with the political bureaucrats. In the end, she would only feature briefly in two short sequences at the end of this and another documentary, filmed eleven years later with the same children (The Feelings Have Grown, 1975). In both films, Doru Segall proudly makes clear that he is both the film’s cinematographer and the father of the girl in the image—a personal, autobiographic detail unusual for a Sahia film. Over the following years, the Segalls continued to work on documentaries about children, including Exams (1976), The High Schoolers (1978), Parents Meeting (1980), and The School Leavers (1986).
This film consists of almost twenty minutes coverage of a political rally, filmed by more than ten Sahia cameramen, during the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of 23 August 1944, ‘the first day of the socialist era’. The Hottest Day is part of a rich author filmography, which includes around one hundred titles, such as A Life Dedicated to the Happiness of the People (1978); Homage (1983); The Party, The Homeland, The People (1986); Heroic Times in Legendary Lands (1987). When the Sahia documentaries obediently followed their political commission, their length could surpass the usual ten to twenty minutes, even reaching feature length. The Hottest Day was one of the shortest film in this category that we could find in the archives.
Ohio riddler faces the emperor of Romania in the ultimate clash to see who will be sleeping with Ceaușescu
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.
