Eva Sîrbu

One woman taxi driver in Bucharest is hoping for a conventional relationship.

The film's protagonists are the orphaned children taken into custody by the state and institutionalized at Children's House no. 6 from Bucharest. For Mészáros, the concern for the situation of children left orphaned during the Second World War is autobiographical: the director directly experienced the absence of parents in her own childhood.

A kid discovers he has heart disease, his mother was trying to keep that from him. He is depressed that he cannot play with the other children. For his mother there is a dilema: not to take any risks and have his boy lead an isolated life, or go with the risky heart surgery.

Report from the Red Flag is an odd presence against the gloomy background of Stalinist Romania. It belongs to a wider body of Sahia films about the living conditions afforded by the new blocks of flats built across Romania – in this case, a workers’ quarter built in ‘Stalin’-town (the name assigned, between 1950 and 1960, to the Transylvanian town of Brasov). While other films bear the imprint of the collectivist, work-centered ethos of the time, Red Flag follows the workers during their downtime, between Saturday 3pm (the end of the working week) and Sunday evening, while they spend quality time with their families, walking, mountain climbing, biking, fishing, or shopping – an opportunity, today, to see candid images of relaxation shot at a time when the state started paying attention to the leisure and tourism facilities available to its citizens.