![]() The resistance he meets is upsetting to watch. He learns that the system is rotten to the core, and so he struggles to push through reforms, hoping to weed out the cronies who have endangered so many lives. Over the following months, the filmmaker records private discussions and meetings with Voiculescu - the film's new focus - inside the bowels of the Ministry.Īt one point he meets with some of the surviving burn victims, and speaks candidly: "The way a state functions can crush people sometimes. His replacement is a young, former patients' rights advocate named Vlad Voiculescu who wins us over with his determination to clean things up from the inside.Īs a result, he gives incredible access to Nanau. Thanks to Tolontan and his team's expose, the health minister was dismissed in May 2016. "I was lucky to be trusted by an open-minded new minister who gave me unprecedented access to the system from within," says Nanau. They soon find themselves conducting stake-outs, interviewing whistleblowers and receiving anonymous threats. The Collective Eye Documentary Films Series is a bi-monthly program that brings award-winning documentaries from Collective Eye Films collection to. We watch as the reporters start questioning the government's suspicious account of the events following the tragedy. Nanau first gained the trust of Tolantan and his team, then shadowed them over the next 14 months, chronicling their efforts. Their leader - the guy Mark Ruffalo or Tom Hanks might play in the easily imaginable Hollywood remake of this ghastly real-world saga - is Catalin Tolontan, the scruffy, noble editor of a sports newspaper who spends much of the film on high alert, anxiously cupping his jaw in his hand. But the scandal that a small team of journalists uncover in Collective is something else again. The country's woeful medical system has been well documented, notably by the Romanian New Wave landmark The Death of Mr. This sort of graceful retreat is repeated through the Oscar-nominated documentary as it follows the thread of one conversation to the next, coolly persevering without ever losing sight of the human lives that have been lost.Ĭolectiv fire survivor Mihai Grecea worked with Nanau on the film, introducing him to fellow survivor Tedy Ursuleanu (pictured here). Rather than milking the shot of the father for the easy emotional pay-off, director-cinematographer-editor Alexander Nanau cuts away, using distance to bear witness rather than participate in the man's grief. He is speaking to a room of strangers: the friends and family left clueless to what went so horribly wrong, after 37 burn victims died in hospital in the four months that followed the 2015 fire at the Colectiv nightclub in Bucharest. ![]() "A communication error killed my son," says the middle-aged man, repeating the government's crass bureaucratic explanation and trying to retain his composure. Collective - an observational documentary about corruption in the Romanian health system that plays out like a jaw-dropping newsroom thriller - opens and closes with a father weeping.
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