Chuck Norris vs Communism

Ilinca Calugareanu's 2015 documentary is about the video cassettes circulating illegally in Romania in the eighties. Under Ceaușescu, television broadcasting had been cut to a few hours a day and its content was entirely controlled. Tapes smuggled in from the West filled that gap; a man named Zamfir built the distribution network, and the translator Irina Margareta Nistor dubbed thousands of films single-handed. Her voice became familiar to viewers gathering secretly in each other's homes, and she was known across the country without ever being seen. The film combines the testimony of people who watched those tapes with reconstruction, and describes what popular culture is for under repression. It does not claim that cinema brought the regime down, but argues that it showed another world existed. Who it's for: viewers curious about the Cold War and the history of film culture. Who it's not for: anyone wanting comprehensive political analysis; the film rests on testimony.