The Reenactment, over and over again (I)
I could hardly imagine a stranger film, in its inside and outside, than the counter-documentary directed by Sahia director Virgil Calotessu shortly after the arrest of the cell behind the Great Communist Heist. That particular Reenactment has something to do with the more famous one authored by Lucian Pintilie and Horia Pătrașcu, even if nothing factual in this direction was ever written down. Anyways, the similarity in title might bring them together, but it is their content that turns them into complements – since what Calotescu did, a filmmaker nowadays remembered either as a dogmatic, or a defender of others by means of artistic self-sacrifice, handler of the most unfortunate projects of the Sahia Studio, is a corrector (not corrective) film, while Pintilie destabilized cinema precisely by shooting a film about the inherent brutality of any attempt at correcting the image of reality.
Film curator, writer and editor, member of the selection committees of BIEFF and Woche der Kritik, FIPRESCI member and alumnus of the film criticism workshops organized by the Sarajevo, Warsaw and Locarno film festivals. Teaches a course on film criticism and analysis at UNATC. He has curated programs for Cinemateca Română, Short Waves, V-F-X Ljubljana, Trieste Film Festival, as well as the Bucharest retrospective of Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour in 2024 and 2025.
