ODESSA

Directed by: Florin Iepan

Romania, Germany - 52 min - 2013

Based on the massacre from October 1941, when Romanian soldiers, without any German assistance, burned alive more than 22.000 civilians, mostly Jews, in the occupied town of Odessa, Iepan starts the first public debate about the fascist past of Romania. ‘Odessa’ follows, with a certain amount of self-irony, the painful and convoluted process through which Iepan discovers the web of complicities and the initial mechanisms which eventually led to the ethnic cleansing carried out by Romanians during the war and inquires to what extent those prejudices and mechanisms of thought can still be found in today’s Romania.