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Collective documentary11/8/2022 ![]() ![]() A brief series of opening intertitles sets the scene, and that’s it. What is most extraordinary about the film is that Nanau reconstructs this multivalent drama without resorting to talking heads or explanatory voice-overs. Collective is an investigative documentary in that Nanau follows two investigators, first Tolontan and his staffers and then Vlad Voiculescu, a patients’-rights advocate who was appointed minister of health for the interim government. An observational documentarian, Nanau shot for fourteen months and then spent a year and a half editing the copious footage. He and Tolontan are two of a kind in their belief that so long as independent journalism can speak truth to power, all is not lost. Nanau began shooting just before Gazeta Sporturilor broke the story. With the next election a year away, an acting government of nonpartisan technocrats was temporarily installed to clean up the mess. Public outrage forced the resignation of the center-left Social Democrat government. They discovered from multiple sources how the disinfectant used throughout the country’s hospital system had been diluted to the point of being useless, and how the scam by the supplier, Hexi Pharma, and its owner, Dan Condrea, had been common knowledge for years within hospitals, the government, and the state security forces. ![]() Cătălin Tolontan, the implacable editor of the Bucharest daily Gazeta Sporturilor, began to look into the situation in the hospital alongside his small team of reporters. In 2015, a fire in the popular Collectiv nightclub in Romania’s capital killed twenty-seven people and injured roughly 180, of whom thirty-seven died in hospital over the next four months from what had not seemed like life-threatening injuries. (When the lump of suet in the White House said he heard that face masks were going out the back door of one New York hospital, his muddled mind must have transposed the practices of his mobbed-up role models in former Soviet republics to his hometown.) Collective gives us a glimpse of the top-the gangster hospital managers and the government functionaries who appointed them, all helping themselves to taxpayer money while providing care that kills. But as a Romanian physician said of Puiu’s movie, it’s even worse if you stick around. Lazarescu (2005)-a foundational title of the New Romanian Cinema that follows a dying old man as he’s rejected by hospital after hospital-has already gotten an eyeful of what passes for emergency medicine in Bucharest. Anyone who has seen Cristi Puiu’s true-story-based narrative The Death of Mr. That was my immediate takeaway, near the end of January-almost to the day that the first Covid-19 case was diagnosed in the United States-from Alexander Nanau’s Collective (2019), a chilling investigative documentary about the endemic, engulfing corruption inside Romania’s health system. IF YOU EVER GET SICK IN ROMANIA, hightail it to Vienna. Alexander Nanau, Colectiv (Collective), 2019, 2K video, color, sound, 109 minutes. ![]()
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