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Historians, courts and ordinary people have yet to give a clear verdict on those events: what really happened?

Chronology

During the Romanian Revolution of 1989, Sibiu witnesses a violent attack on a police station, leading to armed clashes between soldiers, police, protesters and the secret police. References Rocky (1976). Romanian cinema, like a significant part of Romanian society, is still obsessed with the events of December 1989 that led to the fall of communism. Romania was the last country among the former Soviet allies to experience this regime change, and the only one where the change was violent.

Was it an uprising, a coup, a media stunt or a combination of all of these?

‚Liberate‘ Directed by Tudor Giurgiu ('Freedom'), the film focuses on what happened in Sibiu, a city of about 150,000 inhabitants in 1989, located in Transylvania, the geographical center of Romania. In a style that characterizes itself as a docu-drama, the film follows the struggles between forces that until the eve had been allies in preserving communist order and legality and who now find themselves – due to manipulation, inexperience, fear – involved in a violent conflict. Tudor Giurgiu sought and largely succeeded in creating an immersive experience for the audience, recreating the atmosphere of chaos in Sibiu on December 22, 1989 and the ten days that followed. He created a gallery of constantly moving characters, most of whom wore the uniforms of the army, militia or security forces.

Almost all the characters had been collaborators of the old regime and perhaps even profit-seeking

After some time, a few main characters emerge: Viorel Stanese – an officer of the judicial militia who shows up for work and finds himself defending the headquarters of the institution with a gun in his hand against an unclear enemy, Leahu – a taxi driver, but perhaps also. a security informant who finds himself with a gun in his hand at the wrong time, Dragoman, an army colonel who develops in days or perhaps just hours into a revolutionary torturer. The order imposed by the dictatorship collapses, everyone fears and suspects everyone else, some end up in the camp of the victors, others are classified as „terrorists“; and end up imprisoned in a swimming pool emptied of water with some victims of oppression. In an anthological scene protesting against the conditions of detention, former militiamen and security officers shout „Freedom!“.

What does this word really mean?

But what freedom can we talk about after half a century of dictatorship? Tudor Giurgiu makes extensive use of the mobile camera, especially in the first part of the film, with cameramen among the characters, in the crowd on the streets or next to panicked officers in a besieged militia headquarters. The second half of the film is spent most of its time in the structure of a swimming pool, an excellent visual metaphor for the state of imprisonment. As things quiet down, so do the cameras and the film style, returning to the classic narrative.

With this film, Tudor Giurgiu returns to the roots of the last 33 years of Romanian history

The swimming pool gradually empties as the prisoners are released, but the first to leave are those who agree to cooperate. The actors are excellent, the actors live in their roles rather than acting, and the distinction between documentary and fiction has almost completely disappeared. Without judging the characters and their actions, and without a clear stance, he seems to suggest that the current confusion of many segments of Romanian society can be traced back to the confusion of those December days. ‚Free‘ is a deliberately chaotic film about those days of change that could have happened differently.

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