Tales From the Golden Age

A Feature film of

Hanno Höffer, Ioana Uricaru, Razvan Marculescu, Constantin Popescu, Cristian Mungiu

Production year2009

French release30/12/2009

Runtime1 h 20 min

Synopsis

The last 15 years of Ceausescu's regime were the worst years in the history of Rumania. Even so, official propoganda called this period "the golden age."

Tales From the Golden Age is the screen adaptation of the best known urban myths of the time. They are at once comical, strange, and moving, and find their inspiration in ordinary life that is often surreal, when humor was the only way of surviving for an entire people.

Tales From the Golden Age recreates the atmosphere of the time and sketches, with fine touches, the portrait of a country subjected to the perverse logic of a dictatorship. On the occasion of an official visit by Ceausescu, the mayors of country villages went so far as to hang fruit from trees to assure that their villages were given good marks, and they obeyed the strangest orders of the Party's fervent activists.

For its international image, Rumania claimed that illiteracy didn't exist within its borders. Reality was slightly different, however. A young Party member promises his superiors that he will wipe out illiteracy in a remote village...

A policeman receives a live pig as a Christmas present and thinks gassing it will the best way to kill the animal silently, so as not to wake up his famished neighbors...

The secret rules of the Communist Party stipulated that, in official photographs, President Ceausescu should never take off his hat in front of the representatives of "rotten global capitalism," and therefore it should be kept on in front of President Giscard d'Estaing...