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.
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.
Travelogue of Craiova, a (then-)small town in southwestern Romania.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
A compassionate portrait of a lonely old man’s attempt to reconnect with his estranged family is transformed into an investigative cinema verité procedural.
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.
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.
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.
You must have passed through here at least once, says the voiceover commentary during the opening shots of this film. We learn that express trains pass through Meri without stopping and goods trains slow down, but don’t stop. Only the 7:01 commuter train stops, for just a minute, long enough for the teaching staff to alight. Dedicated to all those who live and work in isolated corners of the country, the film conjures up a small, remote world, virtually unknown to wider audiences.
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.
"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."
"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. "
" 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. "
