In "State of Things", director Stere Gulea portrays a couple, a doctor and his assistant, caught in the muddy waters of the Romanian Revolution of December 1989.

 

The secret police had an important contribution to the events preceeding and following the fall of the dictator Ceausescu. With murders and strange happenings on their accounts on those days, many of the secret police officers will cannily and ruthlessly try to "clean up" things.

When the couple is pressured into providing fake documents which would absolve the criminals, the woman refuses to collaborate with the murderers. She is arrested and convicted on a made-up. Humiliated, beaten up and raped in prison, her only comfort is the child she is carrying, whose father is not her present lover, but one of the very torturers.

 

Tragic paradoxes and sad ironies are part of the history written during the Romanian Revolution in December 1989. Some people have regained their freedom, others have lost privileges. Can the old-fashioned communist activists become a genuine part of the new "democratic" system?

 

 

critic credits - Adina Darian

 

 

Cast:

 

Oana Pellea, Razvan Vasilescu,

Dan Condurache, Mara Grigore,

Mircea Rusu

 

 

Screenplay:

 

Stere Gulea, Eugen Uricariu,

(based on an original idea by Lucian Pintilie)

 

 

Producer:

 

Felicia Cernaianu

(Studio no.4 "Cinerom", with support from

the Romanian Department of Culture)