Valeriu Buciu

Famous Romania communist propaganda movie, one of the templates to what followed. It is about the volunteers that built the Bumbești-Livezeni railroad.

This is a communist propaganda movie that follows the life of an engineer who is in conflict with power hungry apparatchiks.

Three sequences which could have formed separate stories are linked together to give a larger perspective on the nature of reality and film. The three episodes are joined together by one film crew at work. In the beginning, the crew is introduced as they juggle their dual roles as State-supported propagandists who laud their government and society, and as private movie makers working on their own film. Next, they are in a restaurant looking for suitable locations to film when the eatery’s owner is induced to wax long and lugubriously on his miserable life. In the last segment, two extras are in the background of a scene, sitting at a table in a restaurant. It slowly becomes apparent to one of them that the man he’s sitting with tortured him more than 40 years ago at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.