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Was there an uprising, a coup, a media phase or a combination of all of these?

Narrative

During the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Sibiu witnesses a violent attack on a police station, leading to armed clashes between soldiers, police, protesters and the secret police. References Rocky (1976). Romanian cinema, like a significant part of Romanian society, remains obsessed with the events of December 1989 that led to the fall of communism. Among the former allies of the Soviet Union, Romania was the last country where this regime change took place, and the only country where the change was violent. Historians, courts, or ordinary people have not yet given a clear verdict on those events: what really happened?

He created a gallery of figures in constant motion, most of them dressed in army, militia or security force uniforms

'Release' The film directed by Tudor Giurgiu ('Freedom') focuses on what happened in Sibiu, in 1989, a city of about 150,000 inhabitants located in Transylvania, in the geographical center of Romania. In a style that characterizes a docu-drama, the film follows the struggles between the forces that, until the eve, had been allies in the preservation of communist order and legality, and which now find themselves – due to manipulation, inexperience, fear – participated – in a violent conflict. Tudor Giurgiu sought and largely succeeded in creating an immersive experience for viewers, recreating the atmosphere of chaos in Sibiu on 22 December 1989 and the ten days that followed. After a while, a few main characters emerge: Viorel Stanese – a judicial militia officer who shows up for work and finds himself defending the institution’s headquarters with a gun against an unclear enemy, Leahu – a taxi driver, but maybe also. a security informant who finds himself holding a gun at the wrong time, an army colonel Dragoman who develops in days or maybe just hours into a revolutionary torturer.

What does this word really mean?

Almost all the characters had been collaborators of the old regime and perhaps even profit-seekers. The order established by the dictatorship collapses, everyone fears and suspects everyone else, some fall into the camp of the victors, others are classified as “terrorists”; and being imprisoned in a drained swimming pool with some victims of oppression. In an anthology scene protesting detention conditions, former militiamen and security chiefs chant “Freedom!”. But what freedom can we talk about after half a century of dictatorship? Tudor Giurgiu makes extensive use of the mobile camera, especially in the first part of the film, cameramen among the characters, in the crowd in the streets or next to the panicked officers in the besieged militia.

With this film, Tudor Giurgiu returns to the roots of Romania’s past 33 years of history

headquarters. The second half of the film is spent most of the time in the structure of the swimming pool, which is an excellent visual metaphor for the prison state. When things quiet down, so do the cameras and the film style returns to the classic narrative. The pool gradually empties as the prisoners are released, but the first to leave are those who agree to cooperate. The actors are excellent, the actors live their roles rather than act and the difference between documentary and fiction has almost completely disappeared.

'Release' is a deliberately chaotic film about those days of change that could have happened differently

Without judging the characters and their actions and without a clear stance, he seems to imply that the current confusion of many segments of Romanian society stems from the confusion of those December days.