Videoteca

On the Banks of the Ozana 1984
On the banks of Ozana follows the lives of children who dedicate their time to agricultural work.

People Telling Stories 1983
People Telling Stories is an industrial, health-and-safety commission turned into an aesthetic exercise by one of the most flamboyant young directors at Sahia. In the early 1980s, Romania experienced a crisis triggered by the so-called ‘Transcendental Movement’ (a variation of the ‘Transcendental Meditation’ movement created by Maharishi Yogi, with some significant involvement from the Romanian Secret Police). Those involved, most of them members of the intellectual elite, were harshly repressed. One of them was Paștina, who lost his right to make documentaries for cinema distribution and was demoted to directing health-and-safety films commissioned to Sahia by various institutions.

Parents' Meeting 1980
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).

Letter from the New Town 1978
What more understated, and yet more effective, ode to urbanization than Mesaroș’s film, which consists entirely from dynamic black&white photographs connected by a voice-over commentary written from the perspective of a naughty pre-teen boy who enjoys to the full the benefits of modernization? His village (Nehoiu, in Buzău county) is about to become a town; the boy writes a letter to his cousin from the capital, Bucharest, to tell him about his daily life. As in Red Flag, humour is a crucial element employed to smooth down the otherwise transparent political ‘message’ of the film: when the boy swallows a button, the mother takes him to the “new” hospital, where the doctors take an x-ray picture “to see if it’s from the shirt or the pants”; the machine is “so good” that they can clearly see what sort of button it is.

A Wedding in Leresti 1976
“Wedding in Leresti: American couple gets married in the Orthodox tradition as local priest is appointed Texan sheriff” – this was the title of a feature published in the August 1973 issue of Tribuna României, a trilingual (French-English-German) Romanian publication targeted at foreign audiences. The unusual event was documented in a Sahia film commissioned by Publiturism, the media arm of Romania’s National Tourism Office, which credited Paul Anghel, the editor-in-chief of the periodical, as scriptwriter.

The Secret 1975
Sahia also picked up commercial work from time to time. In this case, literally; a movie stuntman sells personal injury insurance to onlookers. Included as an extra on the Sahia Vintage DVDs.

The Catastrophe 1971
This is one of hundreds of so-called „ephemeral” films produced by the documentary studio in the wake of serious accidents on Romania’s roads. As was always the case in such films, the guilty party is the driver himself – one of the aims of this category of film was to assign unequivocal guilt. Yet, what makes this coarse lesson, brought to life by actors and non-professionals, more relevant today than it was at the time of its production is its ability to capture more than the event itself and thereby to provide us with a glimpse of the period in which it was produced.

These People 1971
Short documentary about working-class Romanians.

Several Culprits and One Victim 1970
Commissioned by the Ministry of Oil and filmed in the summer of 1970, in Argeș and Ilfov counties, southern Romania, this film was meant to prevent a dangerous practice particularly widespread among people living in rural areas: the transfer of methane gas into homemade containers as a way of stockpiling ‘emergency’ supplies. The film shows a number of accidents of varying levels of gravity, identified after sixteen days of research in the two counties. Via several sync-sound interviews recorded in villages around the region, this stark educational film reveals the vulnerability of a rural world where, as a result of ignorance and lack of education – and also due to limited availability of regulation gas canisters, an issue which remains unmentioned in the film – people ignored basic safety rules on a daily basis and suffered fatal accidents as a consequence.

Shells Have Never Spoken 1962 star_border 6
Shells Have Never Spoken is a black and white documentary film made in 1962 by Sergiu Nicolaescu. It is the first Romanian underwater film.

Film Festival for the Villages 1960
Created with a political-educational purpose and, at the end of the ‘70s, incorporated into the Cîntarea României (Song to Romania) Festival, the Film Festival for the Villages was one of the longest running cultural-political events in Socialist Romania. This film, conceived as a marketing device / trailer for an upcoming festival, is an example of Sahia ephemera. Seen today, it gives us a chance to carry out an ad-hoc archaeology of the film festival as an institution. The film served to increase the festival’s visibility around the country, to announce the dates of the event, and to build expectations among audiences for a certain time of year—in this case, 12 December 1959-31 March 1960.

Little Ones Describe the Big World 1960
Little Ones Describe the Big World is not so much relevant as a sample of the directorial work of filmmaker Gabriel Barta as much as it is as an example of the early writing of one of Romania’s most peculiar and prolific writers, Radu Cosașu, who, at the time, worked closely with the Sahia studio after going through a difficult patch with the political establishment. The film is structured through the father-daughter dialogue written by Cosașu to lend colour and a narrative to the aforementioned exhibition. The style of his writing combines the wit, irony, and casual tone that have become his trademark: here, however, these qualities are put to work for the benefit of the socialist state’s political agenda.

The Events in Hungary 1957
A quick look at the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Us, Aged Five 1955
n 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.