There was a time when I heard to the point of nausea that the working class would part with the past with a laugh. In the movie For me you are Ceausescu, a hybrid documentary, director Sebastián Mihailescu shows us how “young people of today” (a different opinion and a linguistic cliché) approach the same past with a laugh. It is rotated, considered, brought closer, distanced, parodied, often even interpreted in a grotesque way. They are given the opportunity to take part in a casting call organized to find the best interpreter for the young Nicolae Ceausescu.

It must be said that no actor played the so-called “people’s favorite son” either in the Romanian cinema or in a theater performance before 1990. Of course, in Strength and truth the famous 1971 film by Manole Marcus, many recognized him in the eternally young and eternally tireless Comrade Duma, played by the then charismatic Ion Besoyu, Ceausescu, a leader at odds with the dogmatic Pavlov Stoyan. Georgiou-Deja’s alter ego, played by Mircea Albulescu. There is even a play written by the former communist prosecutor Emil Poenaru, performed in the theater of Brasov under the direction of Eugen Markus in 1986, that is, when the famous trial turned 50 years old. The process that today’s historians talk about (see There used to be a communist partypublished in 2021 by the publishing house of Iasi Polisher, under the direction of Adrian Choroianu, or the books of Lavinia Bethea) give us every possible assurance that this is by no means a fiction created in the laboratories of communist propaganda at the height of the cult of characters. The song is called The spring of the hero. But even there, Ceausescu was not put on stage. It was, if I remember correctly, only caused by words.

This is true, but it seems that there is a film made with Soviet money in which Ceaușescu appears as the actor Constantin Fugasin, but this film was never shown, of course, at a high level, on the screens in Romania. And here, on the contrary, in Sebastian Mihailescu’s film, teenagers and post-teens, representatives of different ethnic groups and different social categories, want to play the young Nicolae Ceausescu.

He who entered the trade union movement as a teenager, then a revolutionary, a communist, was arrested, convicted and who in the first years after 1944, like his wife Lenuca Petrescu or Lenuca lu’Brikeag (former Queen of beauty) wrote numerous autobiographies to testify to his experience in the party.

The autobiographies shown as such in Sebastian Mihailescu’s film were relevant at the time audit, struggle for power in the party. Who didn’t know any better. To be a mass party (recall that in 1989 the CPSU had almost four million members) or to be vanguard of the working class. Where only finds a place The best of the best. Just like they were real poll serious activists who held a certain position in the party and who interrogated those who were preparing for their ascension at that time. Important, from this point of view, is the sequence of repetitions in which the young Ceausescu is questioned and in which the famous line from Reconstruction “why bother, why bother?”. The film has all kinds of historical and cultural references. Like, for example, cleaning shoes, singing rudely, etc Internationalperformances by the director himself, who shows young people where patriotic and mobilization inscriptions used to be.

What does Sebastian Mykhailescu do so well? To talk to us without hatred, without distortions, non-didactic, about what was previously called revolutionary youthComrade Nicolae Ceausescu. Nothing inaccurate from the point of view of historical documentation, nothing strange, except parodic. nor Sebastian Mihailescu in any way wants to replace history teachers, maybe he wants to make history as a discipline a little more enjoyable, he alternates moments of maximum tension with others that have not, not all, but at least some they laugh, sing and dance. The hybrid documentary formula works in its favor and it really pays off in my opinion. I say this because I confess that I, as a teacher, have felt the need for footnotes several times. More precisely. I would like to interrupt the screening and tell the young people in the audience who, for example, Emil Bodnarash, Grigore Preoteasa, Forish, Day, Pavel Campeanu are, but that was not the purpose of the film. And that is why Sebastian Mihailescu preferred the hybrid black and white documentary format. Read the whole article and comment on Contributors.ro