Tales from the Golden Age

Twenty years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the end of Communism in Europe.

Across Eastern Europe, the people came out in public revolt against the regimes - including the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania.

Director Cristian Mungiu has brought to life some of the most popular urban myths about the Communist era in Romania in his film, Tales from the Golden Age.

They include countryside mayors having to hang fruit from the trees and paint the grass before a visit from Ceausescu; a policeman trying to silently gas a pig so his hungry neighbours will not realise he has pork to eat on Christmas Day; teenagers selling bottled air ahead of inspections from the Ministry of the Environment.

Twitter postings

"The last years of the Ceausescu regime were the worst in our history," Mungiu explains.

"But their propaganda machine always referred without fail to that period as 'the golden age'."

Mungiu has won the prestigious Palme D'Or at Cannes Film Festival for his gritty and hard-hitting film Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, but Tales is comic, surreal and poignant.

Imprisonment is never far from people's minds as they seek to survive under the twisted logic of the regime.

"I was 21 years old when the Wall fell and a few weeks later, so did the regime in Romania, so I remember many of these legends," says Mungiu.

"I really wanted to make a film for my audience, so I opened up this project to other Romanian directors, and to the public.

"We got a lot of buzz on Twitter and Facebook, with people posting up stories and memories from their youth and adolescence. I thought it was important to get these stories made, before we forget about them."

Mungiu chose the myths, and wrote the screenplay, as well as editing the final cut - but the five different stories are all directed by different Romanian film-makers.

The movie evoked a surprising amount of nostalgia among the public in Romania, particularly with the older generation.

Power cuts

"It's not a kind nostalgia but amongst those over the age of 60, yes certainly. They suffered, yes, but the state was everything, they offered a job for life and then a stable retirement," says the director.

"That sense of stability is now gone. For some people, lack of freedom was less important than a steady job."

Mungiu himself says that as a teenager during the last years of Communism, his biggest memory is the frequent power cuts rather than a regime of terror - but as a young man, he was hopeful freedom would arrive.

"When we heard the Wall was falling in 1989, we knew it was only a matter of time," he recalls.

"We knew a free Europe was coming, we were all listening to the radio, wondering what was happening in our capital. Then by the end of the year, the fear of the system was vanishing and there were people on the streets."

Ceausescu and his wife Elena were shot dead on Christmas Day 1989 after a two-hour trial.

"It was shocking," Mungiu adds.

"Even when it was being reported, we did not believe it for a long time."

The director's whole life changed thanks to the momentous and tumultuous events of those weeks in 1989.

Train drama

"I would never have been allowed to study film. I was going to become a teacher," he says.

When it came to making Tales from the Golden Age, Mungiu had so much material he could have made two films.

Some of these myths are really funny and spectacular. In the end I had to settle on the ones that convey what ordinary life really was like for Romanians."

And his favourite from the ones he had to leave out?

"In the last years, we were supposed to bury people in the area where they had died. A market developed in transporting bodies of people who had passed away far from their local area.

"The story goes that a couple of guys were paid to move an old guy. They put him on a train, wrapped him up and pretended he was drunk and asleep. Then they went to the bar.

"The train started to jolt, and the old man fell into the lap of a young couple in the same carriage. They gave him a violent push, and then discovered to their horror he was dead. They thought they had killed him, panicked and threw his body out of the train window.

"The body was discovered later, and the legend is that someone actually ended up doing time for killing a man who was dead anyway."

Tales from the Golden Age is on release in the UK now.

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Tales from the Golden Age
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