Writing
Several decades after the collapse of the communist system, nostalgia for the former regime has reached unimaginable proportions in almost all former communist European countries. The documentary Nostalgia for Dictatorship does not limit itself to presenting this genuine syndrome of "longing for dictatorship", but, in parallel with the opinions and motivations of ordinary citizens living in the former communist space, it advances explanations by researchers from various fields, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, ethologists, etc., regarding the intimate motivations of such a paradoxical feeling.
George Manu, a brilliant Romanian physicist, is sentenced in 1948 by the communist courts to hard labour for life and imprisoned in Aiud prison. Here he becomes an inexhaustible source of knowledge for the other prisoners, whom he helps to survive the grim world of concentration camps by taking refuge in the world of the knowledge.
Mircea Moraru, the owner of a Romanian media giant, gets involved into politics, in order to lower the financial deficit of his company. As the elections draw closer, attention is focused on the suspicions which arose shortly after Moraru stepped into the life of politics, regarding some financial misconducts. Moraru has to resist the siege, lead by two of his former friends and associates, who are trying to take advantage of the situation and remove him from his leading position in the company. This is yet another battle for Moraru, who sticks to his principles, even though they had cost him his family.
Inspired by a true story, the film presents a TV reporter's journalistic investigation into alleged American "flying prisons" in Romania. Through a combination of circumstances, following a mysterious File 631, Dinu (Iosif Paștina) discovers a leak from a NATO base in Romania. The news event stirs, provokes, tempts various media, top politicians, services, both internal and external, causing both hilarious and absurd dramas in a black comedy. The journalistic endeavour of the "newly" turned investigative reporter is a tough, not easy, test to preserve his professional dignity, but also his character, noting the duplicity, the moral volatility, the lack of measure of a world that relentlessly continues its course.
