The film's protagonists are the orphaned children taken into custody by the state and institutionalized at Children's House no. 6 from Bucharest. For Mészáros, the concern for the situation of children left orphaned during the Second World War is autobiographical: the director directly experienced the absence of parents in her own childhood.
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.
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.
At the beginning of the 70s, Sahia Studio produced a number of social investigations commissioned by the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, intended to expose the so-called "social parasitism". The decision was taken after the theses of July 1971, which provide that "one of the main objectives of political work, especially among the youth, is the firm fight against the tendencies of parasitism, of an easy life, without work, the cultivation of responsibility and the duty to work , in the service of the country, the people, the socialist society". The most famous films, made with the competition of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice, are Să treacă vara and Iarna unor pierde vară
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.
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.
"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.
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.
A look at Romania's increasing mechanization in the seventies told from the perspective of a wanderer.
"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 cine-postcard directed at the Bucharest of 2080, For Our Heirs… is a charming time capsule whose innocuous humour and visuals will soon stand in sharp contrast to the harsh reality of the decade’s austerity measures.
Like Márta Mészáros, Florica Holban experienced losing her parents and institutionalization first-hand as a young child, which later triggered her long-term interest in the lives of the children growing up in state care. Holban’s Who Is to Blame? has something else in common with Mészáros’s Let All the Children Smile: they both include sequences filmed at the same orphanage in Bucharest (Orphanage No. 6)—Mészáros in the mid-50s, Holban a decade later. The two films also share a certain discretion regarding the role of the State, which assumed parental responsibility for children abandoned or separated from their parents. Here, both directors allow, albeit only briefly, the lonely and deprived children to appear as individuals with their own histories and traumas. Unlike Mészáros, however, Holban approaches her topic through a judicial lens: numerous sequences from her film were shot at the Tribunal, and the film credits a prosecutor as a consultant.
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.
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.
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.
Documentary about the fall of the old city of Orșova due to the construction of the Iron Gates hydroelectric power station.
"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.
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.
Let’s work, but how? reproachfully asks one of the workers from the Station for the Mechanization of Agriculture (SMA) in Țăndărei, where filmmaker T. Barta was sent to document the lives of an agricultural brigade. Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, the film was intended for screening in cinemas. Eight days had been allocated for the full shoot, without prior recce. On the first day, the filmmaker gathered the men round a fire—without having informed the local mayor, the Party Secretary or the head of the SMA, as was customary at the time—and recorded their thoughts about their work: sound only, no images. Once that was completed, the remaining days were dedicated to collecting images of the community.
