Then I Sentenced Them All to Death

A village in Romania during the Second World War. A priest and his wife take in an orphaned boy. The boy becomes the friend of a man everyone in the village mocks and keeps at a distance. In the last days of the war a German soldier is killed. An ultimatum is put to the village: hand over the killer or the place will be destroyed. The villagers choose that man. Sergiu Nicolaescu's Romanian film tells the war from inside a village rather than at the front. Its real subject is not the occupation but who a community is willing to give up in order to save itself. Amza Pellea and Gheorghe Dinică are in the cast. The telling does not make monsters of the villagers, nor does it excuse what they do; the boy's gaze is the conscience of the film.