Portrait of the Fighter as a Young Man

After the Soviet army entered Romania in 1944, part of the population took to the mountains. Those groups held nationalists and fascists but also liberals, farmers with no interest in politics and middle class people whose property had been taken. More than a thousand armed groups sheltered in the forests of the Carpathians and waited for a support from the Western allies that never came. One of them was led by Ion Gavrilă-Ogoranu, who was not found until his arrest in 1976. The film is about the daily existence of that group. Hunger, exhaustion and silence are the real material; a war that cannot be won goes on. Capture means torture and often death, and the Securitate is always behind them. The film neither exalts these men nor accuses them; it shows what they did and what they turned into. Constantin Popescu Jr.’s hundred and forty one minute Romanian film was completed in 2010.