The last few years have shown us that documentary cinema has, perhaps more than ever, the power to bring topical, shocking, often political topics to the fore. In 2023, at the gala ceremony of awarding the Oscars, the film “Navalnyi” / Navalnîi, directed by Daniel Roer, won the statuette for the best documentary film. The film tells about the poisoning of “Rookie”, the recovery and return to Russia of the most important Russian opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, in the second half of 2020. Then, in March 2023, on the gala stage, this moment was surrounded by a ray of hope that Oleksiy Navalny would one day manage to get out of prison alive. A year later, at the “Oscar” ceremony, which took place a few weeks ago, Navalny’s personality will be honored, and the documentary film about him will remain, as the world press wrote, his testament. At this gala concert, the award for the best documentary film went to the film 20 Days in Mariupol by director Mstislav Chernov, who, accompanied by photographer Yevhen Maloletka and producer Vasylisa Stepanenko, arrived in Mariupol an hour before Russia began bombing the port city. Thus, they were the last journalists who remained in the Ukrainian city, where they managed to record the horrors of war for three weeks.

Without drawing comparisons, but joining it with an “activist” type documentary, The Case of Engineer Ursu, directed by Liviu Tofan and Şerban Georgescu, tells the story of civil engineer Gheorghe Ursu, who became a dissident and was killed by the system in November 1985, and his son Andrii Ursa, who since the spring of 1990 has been fighting for the conviction of those responsible for his father’s death. This is the second and most extensive documentary on the case, after Cornel Michalache’s 1995 TVR Babu – The Case of Gheorghe Ursu[1]. Two directors, Liviu Tofan, journalist, former news editor of Radio Europa Liberă and author of several volumes on various moments in the history of Romanian communism, as well as director of the documentary Brasov 1987. Two Years Too Fast (2017) and documentary filmmaker Sherban Georgescu follow the trajectory of Andrei Ursa, passing through the most important stages of the trial, which took place during the 33 years of post-communist Romania. Using archival images, most of which come from the archives of the Gheorghe Ursu Foundation, collected and systematized by his son, or from various interviews given over the years by some of those involved in the case, from one side or the other, the film reveals the fierce struggle for justice and conviction of those responsible for the dissident’s death. Using the principles of a television documentary, sometimes too static, the film follows the lives of two Ursu engineers, father and son, through the thread of the latter’s narrative, leaving at the end the impression not only of the narrative, but also of the imaginative realities in which half of the son’s life has passed. The film also reflects Andrii Ursu’s physical transformations during more than three decades of fighting for justice, and in this sense, the strongest is the archival footage from the moments when he was on hunger strike in protest against the blocking of the case and the judicial approach. Along with him in this never-ending story appear important characters, both then and now, especially the lead attorney in the case, Eugenia Krangariou, and the first prosecutor to handle the case, Dan Voinea.

Originally developed in a preliminary verdict before the final verdict in the appeal case of the High Court of Cassation and Justice[2]the film has the merit of presenting both the personality of the engineer Gheorghe Ursa and his fate as a dissident, often described incompletely or incorrectly in the press and in the writings of historians, as well as the struggle for justice in the Romanian justice system, which continues to be led by his son[3]. Although mostly shot indoors – Andrii Ursu’s testimony is recorded in the apartment where he lives during his frequent returns to Bucharest – thus leaving out potential lieux de mémoires / places of memory[4] with a direct connection to the case, from the Patria quarter to the quarter where the engineer and his family lived, the documentary tells how Andriy Ursu crosses the city by bicycle, in particular to the crematorium, where the funeral urns of his father and other members of the family ‘I. Practically from beginning to end, the film covers half of Andrii Ursu’s life and thus provides an opportunity to reveal and clarify some details of Gheorghe Ursu’s dissidence and trials that have been going on for more than three decades. _Read the rest of the article and comment on Contributors.ro