“You are doing this film for fame and awards. Don’t you think our child will see it one day?”

Dragoş Binder is committed to making a fiction film about the lives of his parents in the early 80s. These were the most dangerous years of Nicolae Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime. The Securitate controlled and persecuted Romanian society. Their informants collected detailed reports on certain citizens, similar to the KGB, with infiltrated agents in schools, factories, and clinics, among friends, and families.

Dragoş can’t remember anything about the irreparably broken relationships with his doctor father Emil and mother Valentina. Recently declassified secret archives reopen scary, censored, blackmailed, and manipulated shadows of the past. Stuck between two women, Dragoş is too stubborn to uncover the objective truth behind the love affair between his mother and the swimming instructor Harald Stern, a suspected collaborator with the Government. Obsessed and paranoid Dragoş digs deep for the script, but the excessively unbearable information turns into awkward accusations, humiliating suspicions, buried pain, and hurtful revelations, from which a caring mother always preferred to protect him.

The former big winner of Berlin, Locarno, and Thessaloniki festivals Călin Peter Netzer (“Child’s Pose”, “Ana, Mon Amour”) sneaks in two Hitchcockian cameos and gets intensely personal in a complex multi-layered split-screened investigative drama, partially based on his family’s emigration to West Germany in 1983 and thrillingly captured by two handheld cameras.

Edvinas Pukšta