Under Surveillance by the Securitate 1970–1980
Surveillance: Secret Police Film Festival 2.
New York-i Nyílt Társadalom Intézet / Open Society Foundations, New York
Goethe-Institut Budapest
The second event of the retrospective film program “Surveillance: Secret Police Film Festival”, which includes an international selection of training films, newsreels and operative films produced by Communist Secret Police 1962–1989.
Secret House Search / Titkos házkutatás (instructional film)
Communist state security agents enter a home of a couple while they are out at work and at a spa. The goal is to find any prohibited and hidden objects, like US Dollars. The evidence will be used to blackmail the citizens and turn them into secret agents.
Hungary, Hungarian with English subtitles, 1962, 18 min
Under Surveillance by the Securitate 1970–1980 (documentary film)
The movie portrays the extreme case of surveillance under Romanian communism; in between 70s and 80s Securitate was a key-institution in Romania: it not only observed its citizens, but also brutally repressed and domesticated them. The persons who viewed their files engage in storytelling their dramatic encounters with the secret police and, at the same time, reflect on the logic of the documents who insidiously mapped their lives. It's a movie of unappeased trauma, hinting at other continuities in nowadays Romanian political life.
directed by Nicolae Mărgineanu, Romania, Romanian with English voiceover, 2009, 56 min
Introduction and follow up analyses by Ioana Macrea-Toma (Historian, OSA) and András Mink (Historian OSA)
The program is in English.