Certitudinea probabilităților / The Certainty of Probabilities / Certitudinea probabilităților

România, 2021

90’

Regie: Raluca Durbacă

1968, The Socialist Republic of Romania. Women catch up on the latest tendencies in beachwear, the young hippies of Hamburg are harshly criticized by Romanian students, while Nicolae Ceaușescu reads the famous defiance speech against the intervention of the Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia. Floating solemnly over all this is The Internationale, sung on a stadium by a crowd of pioneers dressed in white shirts and red ties. A certainty for each probability: the documentary is at the same time a history lesson and an ideological warning sign, the director’s endeavour permanently draws our attention to the functions of the propaganda film, yet without tarnishing the fascination that dwells in the core of the images, that of the figures that wave at us from a past buried in commonplaces and political parti pris. From behind the ideological façade, through bits and pieces cropping up from underneath the idealistic-bombastic discourse, a bygone world is revealed, one that remained captive in the archives of the Sahia studios. Between cultivating tens of varieties of roses on the soil of Dobrogea and the industrial petrochemical brocade fits an entire history. (Andreea Chiper)

Raluca Durbacă is a director of documentaries and film critic. She graduated from the Faculty of Communication and Public Relations of SNSPA (2006) and from the Faculty of Film of UNATC Bucharest (2015). She has been a collaborator of the Film Menu cinema magazine (since 2012) and guest film critic for Éducation à l’image, a cinematographic education program for high school students, organized by NexT International Film Festival in partnership with the French Institute in Bucharest. She has published essays in the edited volumes ”The Politics of Film. Contributions to the interpretation of contemporary Romanian cinema” and ”The Transition Film: Contributions towards a critique of Romanian 1990s cinema”. She has over 10 years of experience in film production and she has collaborated with various Romanian film festivals. ”The Certainty of Probabilities” is her debut.

The Certainty of Probabilities - Raluca Durbacă in conversation with Andrei Rus