I know that you know that the Romanian National Film Archive had a couple of films made by the fabulous Márta Mészáros, which comprises more than the documentaries she directed in her years at the Sahia Film Studios. Just a little before our current era, on the 7th of March, 2020, I helped organize what was to be my final screening within the FILM MENU collective, which was no more, no less than a marathon of 4 films directed by Mészáros across the seventies and eighties. Those who went to the Cinematheque that day know that two of those four films were ruthlessly cut by the authorities before running on Romanian screens. Which isn’t any sort of news, in the end – this is just one of the many idiosyncrasies that the Bucharest-led regime espoused towards the films that would, in time, comprise the canon of Eastern cinema.

Călin Boto

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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.

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