AUTOBIOGRAFIA LUI NICOLAE CEAUSESCU

A dictator tells his own life story – in the images he had made of himself. Andrei Ujică’s “Autobiografia lui Nicolae Ceaușescu” (Romania 2010) opens with the show trial of December 1989 and unrolls twenty-five years of rule from there: party congresses, state visits, hunting trips, holidays on the Black Sea, the parades and cheering choirs of a country the Conducător tried to shape in his own image. There is no commentary, no interviews, no framing from outside. What is shown comes from over a thousand hours of material held in the Romanian national archives, drawn from official records as well as from the Ceaușescu family’s private films.

From this material Ujică assembles three hours that draw their own truth out of the propaganda images: the longer one watches, the clearer the emptiness behind the ceremony becomes. The film closes Ujică’s trilogy on the end of communism, following “Videograms of a Revolution” (1992, with Harun Farocki) and “Out of the Present” (1995). It premiered in Cannes in 2010, in the official selection outside competition. The film was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2010.

Shown at the 2010 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2010 · Film Archive