Vlad is the new Minister of Health, the one who promises to “stop lying.” We watch his uphill fight against pass-the-buck underlings, a combative press and a public easily swayed by Big Promises for the political party responsible for the state of affairs, pretending none of it is their fauly. Nanau’s film follows three main threads - Tolontan and colleague Mirela Neag digging and pushing the widening scandal story forward, forcing resignations along the way, young burn victim Tedy Ursuleanu‘s recovery (acquiring an artificial hand, modeling as the face of the tragedy) and in the offices and press conferences of Vlad Voisculescu, the “patients’ advocate” lobbyist brought in with a wave of “technocrats” to clean up a government proven to be just as corrupt as the dictatorship it replaced decades ago. His “suicide” has a Jeffrey Epstein convenience about it. Plainly the briber-in-chief could have implicated hundreds of not jus no jt hack hospital managers, but an entrenched, corrupt government that looked the other way. It took a newspaper with “sports” as its primary readership, Sports Gazette, and several intrepid reporters to blow up this scandal, which ranged from bribed managers running the hospitals to a firm - Hexi Pharma - and its offshore financed chief, which watered down disinfectants, and even IODINE, in what lead reporter Catalin Tolontan described as “an experiment,” with every hospital patient in the country a guinea pig to see just how bad things could get before the deaths became public and outrage exploded. Patients were so poorly cared for that they got maggots in their wounds. Another 37 people died, some with survivable burn wounds, but treated in hospitals run on bribes and cost-cutting, so filled with infection that they could boast “the most deplorable sanitary conditions in Europe.” It is horrific cell-phone footage.īut the real horror came days later. The Colectiv club blaze injured 180 others, and at one point we see the moment it started and the chaos that followed during a speed metal concert there.
One can’t watch the Romanian documentary “Collective (Colectiv)” without feeling as if the film is a snapshot of America’s future.Ī kleptocracy run amok, corruption spreading up and down the bureaucratic ladder, a tragedy that exposes a rotten system overwhelmed and caught with its pants down.Īnd a leader stands before the press and vows (in Romanian, with English subtitles) that “the first thing to do to regain trust is to stop lying.”įor Romania, that came after a fire in a Bucharest night club without a fire suppression system and with too few (unmarked) exits killed 27.
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