Romanian film review – 30 Years Later: One World Romania

It has been almost 30 years since the Revolutions of 1989, and this year’s edition of the international documentary festival for human rights One World Romania, which took place between March 15 and 24 in Bucharest, reflected on it with an impressive programme, not just in terms of selection, but also by putting together the many side events (among them a public dialogue with president Klaus Iohannis).

Led by a new artistic team (film critic, author and lecturer Andrei Rus and filmmaker Vanina Vignal) the festival was as reliable as ever in covering not only some of the more pressing human rights issues, but also in offering a context for discussion, both by showing older films and debating the topics with filmmakers and experts.

Sections were dedicated to LGBTQI+ issues, revolutions and the periods following them, women, contemporary families, work, or migration. The winner, selected by a jury made of highschoolers (true to the festival’s mission to include the young and to educate) is Bernadett Tuza-Ritter’s A Woman Captured, a harrowing look at a woman who has spent 10 years working for a Hungarian family in a state of captivity that is shocking to see.

The list of other remarkable films would go way beyond the scope of this review but if I had to choose a consistently excellent series of films, it would be the retrospective dedicated to Austrian veteran filmmaker Ruth Beckermann. Her 2018 picture The Waldheim Waltz unfolds like the best of thrillers and deals with former U.N. General Secretary Kurt Waldheim’s 1986 election campaign for Austrian presidency in the context of him being exposed as having been a Nazi collaborator and involved in the murder of partisans in former Yugoslavia (which he kept denying), asking questions of the country’s relation to its past. Her other films shown (The Paper Bridge, East of War,Homemad(e)), are just as involving and thought-provoking.

But the absolute highlight was the screening of one of the most influential documentaries of all time, Marcel Ophül’s 1969 The Sorrow and the Pity. Clocking in at over 4 hours, it looks at the town of Clermont-Ferrand in central France who had been occupied by the Germans during World War II and interviews inhabitants and former German officers and soldiers on their memory of the period, and the decisions they made for their lives at the time (collaboration and resistance being key words here, but Ophüls is too intelligent a filmmaker and connoisseur of human nature to point fingers). This is a towering achievement, a brilliant study of power, people under pressure, and what makes a moral decision, shot with insight, empathy, and wisdom.