Libertate 2023 Download Magnet

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Neither historians, nor courts, nor ordinary people have yet given a clear verdict on those events: what really happened?

During the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Sibiu witnesses a violent attack on a police station that degenerates into armed clashes between soldiers, police, protesters and the secret police. References Rocky (1976). Romanian cinema, like a significant part of Romanian society, is still haunted by the events of December 1989, which led to the fall of communism. Romania was the last country among the former allies of the USSR where this regime change took place and the only one where the transition was violent.

Was there a popular uprising, a coup d’état, the media scene or a combination of all of these?

«Libertate» (‘Freedom’), the film directed by Tudor Giurgiu, focuses on what happened in Sibiu, a city that in 1989 had about 150 thousand inhabitants, located in Transylvania, in the geographical center of Romania. In a style that can be defined as docu-drama, the film follows the struggles between the forces that until the day before had been allies in the preservation of communist order and legality, and who now find themselves – through manipulation, inexperience, fear – engaged in – a violent conflict. Tudor Giurgiu aimed and largely succeeded in creating an immersive experience for the viewers, recreating the atmosphere of chaos in Sibiu on December 22, 1989 and in the ten days that followed. He created a gallery of characters in constant movement, most of whom wear uniforms of the army, militia or security forces.

Almost all the characters had been collaborators and perhaps even profiteers of the old regime

After some time, some 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 in his hand against an unclear enemy, Leahu, a taxi driver but perhaps also a security informant who finds himself with a gun in his hand at the wrong time, the army colonel Dragoman who evolves in a few days or perhaps just hours from revolutionary to torturer. The order imposed by the dictatorship collapses, everyone fears and suspects everyone else, some find themselves in the winners’ camp, others are categorized as «terrorists» and become prisoners in a pool emptied of water, together with some of the victims of repression. In an anthological scene, protesting the conditions of detention, former militiamen and security officers chant «Freedom!». But what kind of Freedom can we talk about after half a century of dictatorship?

What does this word really mean?

Tudor Giurgiu makes extensive use, especially in the first part of the film, of the mobile camera, with the cameramen among the characters, among the crowds on the streets or next to the panicked officers in the besieged Militia headquarters. The second half of the film is spent mostly in the structure of the swimming pool, an excellent visual metaphor for a prison space. As things calm down, so do the cameras and the cinematic style returns to a classical narrative. The swimming pool gradually empties as the prisoners are freed, but the first to leave are those who agree to cooperate.

With this film, Tudor Giurgiu returns to the roots of Romanian history of the last 33 years

The cast is excellent, the actors live their roles rather than act and the difference between documentary and fiction is almost completely erased. Without judging the characters and their actions and without taking explicit attitudes, he seems to suggest that the current disorientation of many segments of Romanian society has its origins in the confusion of those December days. «Libertate» is a deliberately chaotic film about those days of change that could have happened differently.