Reconstruction

Two young men, Vuica and Nicu, got drunk in a restaurant and started a fight. The prosecutor decides to turn this into a teaching film: the young men will be taken back to the same restaurant, act out that night from the beginning, and all of it will be filmed and shown as an educational film about the harm of alcohol. With them are a prosecutor, a few policemen, a teacher and a camera crew. The re-enactment goes on from morning until evening. Lucian Pintilie's film is counted among the most important works of Romanian cinema. On the surface a simple day is described, but something else runs underneath: a state making people do a thing that already happened over and over so it will fit its own account, and with every repetition the truth is crushed a little further. The film was pulled by the authorities shortly after it opened and was not shown for years. A hundred minutes. The ending makes plain where that day was heading all along.