DocuNotes 2010: Ceausescu

It is 180 minutes long, it is from 2010, the director is Andrei Ujica, if you can talk about a director, when it comes to this amazing work ”The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu” that must be obligatory in all film lessons about the propaganda film genre. It is all so well filmed, gorgeous camerawork, archive after archive, official archive, put together by Ujica without any commentary, in chronological order, it talks for itself, it makes you speechless. You see a visionary man who reached for power, in the beginning with good intentions, to fight for the poor man and his life, and he broke with the East block after Prague 1968, and then, as the archive shows slowly, he gets more and more excluded from reality, and ends up as we all remember it from the terrible broadcasted scenes: as a man in a corner being shouted at denying any violence performed from the state. Later to be shot as a dog in a courtyard – which we do not see in the film, a clever move by the director, he knows that we have that scene in our heads.

Romania, 2010, seen at the videothèque of cph:dox

http://www.the-autobiography.com/

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Tue Steen Müller
Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

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