BUCHAREST, Romania — On October 30, 2015, a fire ripped
through a nightclub in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, leaving 64 people dead.
Almost six years later, a documentary about the fire and its tragic aftermath
has been nominated for two Oscars.
اضافة اعلان
It would be the first Oscar win for the Eastern European
country, but the film’s success is bittersweet for many Romanians, given its
painful subject matter — particularly since many believe not enough has changed
since 2015.
“Collective,” which has been nominated for best documentary
feature and best foreign film, follows a group of investigative journalists
from a sports newspaper as they uncover painful truths about the Romanian
health care system.
“The situation was so appalling that basically it should
have been a big scandal in the whole of Europe,” said Alexander Nanau, the film’s
director.
Events on the night of the fire and its immediate aftermath
ricocheted across Romania, toppling the government at the time — led by the
Social Democratic Party — and mobilizing civil society into large-scale
protests.
In the years since, however, there have been further
political scandals, and few health care overhauls. The coronavirus pandemic has
also put huge new demands on the struggling Romanian health care system. Two
fires in COVID-19 wards in the last six months have left at least 20 people
dead.
Many Romanians wonder how much has really changed since
“Collective.”
While tragic, the nightclub fire is just the film’s starting
point. The blaze claimed 27 lives in its immediate aftermath, but 64 people
would ultimately die, many victims of a health care system awash with
corruption and willing to hide painful truth from the victims and their
families.
Standing outside one of Bucharest’s main hospitals, Nanau
recalled: “It was basically in front of this hospital where the minister of
health always stood flanked by doctors saying ‘We can treat the burn victims at
the highest standards.’”
However, as the journalists found out, the burn unit was not
even operational at the time, Nanau said. “It’s incredible that they have the
guts to lie to all these people that their kids are being given surgery in the
most modern burn unit when in fact this was closed.”
The journalists also discovered that the disinfectant used
in hospitals across the country was being watered down, to the extent that it
was largely ineffectual, probably resulting in many more deaths. The owner of
the company involved drove his car into a tree after the truth was brought to
light, killing himself.
The documentary shows in real time the reaction of the
journalists after a whistleblower sends them footage from a hospital of maggots
crawling in the wound of a burn victim.
The film has been compared to both “Spotlight” and “All the
President’s Men,” and in a review for The New York Times late last year,
Manohla Dargis described “Collective” as a “staggering documentary” that
offered “no moment when you can take an easy breath, assured that the terrible
things you’ve been watching onscreen are finally over.”
For people in Romania, however, much of what is shown
onscreen is painfully familiar.
Catalin Tolontan, then editor-in-chief of the daily
newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor, is one of the main protagonists of “Collective.”
Before the documentary, “We used to receive 10 or 15 messages per day from the
public, with scoops or information,” he said in an interview. “After the movie
we received 70 to 80 a day.”
Tedy Ursuleanu, who suffered severe burns across her head
and body, and had her fingers amputated as a result of the fire, is one of the
strongest characters in the film.
In an interview, she said that it was not a hard decision to
let the filmmakers follow her, but that seeing the film was a painful
experience. “When I saw some of the scenes, the impact was as if I lived those
moments again,” Ursuleanu said. “I started to cry. I needed to go outside to
compose myself.”
Ursuleanu said she believed that not enough progress had
been made in the years since the documentary was filmed. “Changes have taken
place, but they are few compared to the needs we have here,” she said. “Sadly,
tragedies like this could easily happen again, because even now measures are
not respected.”
Partway through the documentary, “Collective” introduces a
young, reform-minded health minister, Vlad Voiculescu, who is brought in as
part of a short-lived technocrat government.
Voiculescu and his team face strong resistance as they try
to bring greater transparency to the health care system, while having to accept
that the system was culpable in many deaths.
In a recent interview, Voiculescu, who was reappointed as
health minister late last year, said that what frustrated him most was that on
his return he found an institution that was “even more collapsed than before.”
Now, Voiculescu is more focused on dealing with the coronavirus than
overhauling the Romanian health care system.
“Collective,” which appeared on streaming platforms late
last year, has resonated strongly with audiences around the world, especially
at a time when the pandemic has made health care a central issue globally.
Nanau, a Romanian director who spent much of his life in
Germany before moving back to his home country in 2015, has a track record of
producing powerful documentaries. His previous film, “Toto and His Sisters,”
followed the lives of three teenagers left to fend largely for themselves in one
of the poorest areas of Bucharest, after their mother was sent to prison on
drug charges.
But with “Collective,” he seems to have found a subject that
hit at a perfect moment.
The film’s impact has also been felt outside Romania.
Earlier this year in Mongolia, when a woman with COVID-19 was transferred from
the hospital in freezing temperatures just days after giving birth, journalists
began asking tough questions of the government, apparently encouraging one
another on Facebook by referencing “Collective,” which a local television
station had shown days earlier. Protests followed, and the government
ultimately resigned.
Andrei Gorzo, a Romanian film critic, said that it was
harder for Romanian viewers to see “Collective” as a morally clear-cut tale of
a few good people fighting to change the rotten system. Instead, he said, it
captures a specific moment in Romania, when urban, middle-class voters believed
in a new breed of politician, young and unsullied, who could clean up Romanian
politics. “It is impossible for me to watch the film without acknowledging that
a lot of that romanticism has turned sour since then,” he said.
Others are more optimistic. “The generation that will change
things here is not the generation that is 35-plus,” Nanau said. “It’s the
younger generation, and these are the people that write to us, that we have met
in the cinemas.”
