The Dead Nation – film screening and Q&A with Adrian Cioflânca

We have the pleasure of inviting you to a film screening within The Rise of Eastern Culture / Another Dimension festival:

The Dead Nation / Țara moarta – and a Q&A with Romanian historian Adrian Cioflânca

August 29th, 2019, 8:30 PM
Forum cinema, 5 Legionowa Street
free tickets available on two dates: from August 19th (from 5 PM) and from August 26th (from 5 PM) at the Forum cinema’s box office, 5 Legionowa Street

festival’s website with complete schedule

The Dead Nation / Țara moartǎ
dir. Radu Jude, Romania 2017, 83’

The film is about a collection of photographs from a small Romanian town, created in the 1930s and 1940s. The soundtrack, consisting mainly of the read fragments of a diary of a Jewish doctor Emil Dorian who lived during the war in Bucharest, tells what photographs do not show: the birth of anti-Semitism and finally the shocking picture of Romanian persecution of Jews, a topic rarely addressed in contemporary Romania. The photographs were taken by Costică Acsinte…

Director Radu Jude: This is my most political and philosophical film. It is political because it touches on a subject rarely touched upon in our society: anti-Semitism and mass murders of the Jewish population during the war. Until recently, Romanians blamed the Germans for it. Although the works of many historians clearly showed that Romania is responsible for the Holocaust in the country (according to Raul Hilberg, the number of victims amounted to around 400,000), the perception of this subject in the collective consciousness of our nation has not changed. I felt the need to address this topic because as a Romanian I consider it important and urgent because we see the return of extremism throughout Europe. It is also a philosophical film, a special kind of found-footage film that tries to show limitations and problems of the visual perception of reality, especially history. Photography shows us something and at the same time hides what is outside its frame…

The guest of the screening will be Adrian Cioflâncă, Romanian historian and director of the Center for the Study of Jewish History in Romania.

Adrian Cioflâncă – historian, director of the Center for the Study of Jewish History in Romania and a member of the Collegium of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives. Researcher with the „A. D. Xenopol” Institute of History. He was a member of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (2003-2004) and expert in The Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (2006), co-author of the Final Reports of the two commissions. Since 2005, he has been a member of the Romanian Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Tziporah Wiesel Fellow of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (2009). Between 2010-2012, he was director of department in The Institute for the Investigation of the Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile. Adrian Cioflâncă edited, in collaboration, seven volumes and authored studies in fields like the history of the Holocaust, history of communism, political violence, cultural history, the theory of history.

Co-organizer: Romanian Institute of Culture in Warsaw