RECONSTRUCTION

The story you are about to see is true. None of the names have been changed to protect the innocent; there are no innocents. In 1959, Soviet-run satellite Romania was rocked by a most un-comradely event – an American-style armored-car holdup in which a gang of thieves gained more than a million lei in government money. It was a futile heist in a tightly controlled communist dictatorship, where neighbor routinely spied upon neighbor, and the thieves were soon rounded up. Among the six conspirators were a former member of the security forces, one of the state's leading intellectuals, his brother and a beautiful woman named Monica. In a reaction as grimly unusual as the felony, the state's movie cameras shot a stark docudrama entitled “Reconstruction,” starring the indicted perpetrators. In a grotesque, propagandistic portrayal of crime and punishment, Marxist-Leninist style, the condemned prisoners portrayed themselves; they were routinely trotted out of their cells to re-enact their misdeeds and face judgment before a pitiless camera lens. Now, out of the shadows and ghosts of Iron Curtain history, Irene Lusztig investigates “Reconstruction.” She revisits the bank, the jail and the survivors, for a stranger-than-fiction chronicle of deaths foretold, and “true crime” in every sense of the word. Lusztig's interest is personal, for the infamous Monica Sevianu, whether free spirit or femme fatale, was her own grandmother. (Partially in Romanian, French and Hebrew with English subtitles)