Alexander Nanau’s documentary follows sports reporters from a nightclub fire into the hospitals that killed its survivors, then into the ministry that let them. It is patient, angry and unusually clear, and it loses a little of its grip when it changes protagonist.
The Colectiv nightclub in Bucharest caught fire on the night of 30 October 2015, during a rock concert. Twenty-seven people died on the night. By the following spring the toll was 64, most of the later deaths from infections picked up in Romanian hospitals. Alexander Nanau’s documentary is about the second number, and about the handful of people who kept asking why it was so high. He puts no questions on camera and explains nothing in voiceover. There are no captions telling us who anyone is. We are dropped into the story and left to keep up, and for most of 109 minutes we could.
For the first hour the story belongs to the newsroom of a sports daily. Cătălin Tolontan, its editor, is a big, unsmiling man who talks to officials the way a referee talks to a player who has just dived, and his colleagues Mirela Neag and Razvan Lutac do the phoning and the waiting outside doors. A tip about the disinfectant used in the hospitals sends them to a laboratory. The results come back a fraction of what the labels promise. That is the whole of the first act, and it is told the way good reporting is done: a call, a document, a second call to check the first.
Nanau shot it himself, handheld, in offices, corridors and the back seats of cars, and he has a reporter’s sense of where to stand: at Tolontan’s shoulder as he reads, across the table from a press officer who has run out of sentences. Four editors are credited, Dana Bunescu, George Cragg, Ana García and Nanau again, and the cutting is calm to the point of stubbornness. Scenes run until the people in them have finished, not until we have got the point. Kyan Bayani’s music is a low held tone that turns up rarely and leaves quickly.
We should say what it did to us. A doctor, Camelia Roiu, brings the reporters footage shot inside her own hospital, and we will not describe it beyond saying that it concerns a patient’s wound. We felt sick. Then we felt worse, because the people watching it on screen do not look surprised, and the parents of the dead, given a microphone at a press conference, speak as if they stopped expecting anyone at the front table to look up some time ago. That is the film’s subject. Not one crime, but a country in which everybody at the table already knew.
Halfway through, the film changes hands. Vlad Voiculescu, a new health minister, lets Nanau into his office, and we watch him learn, meeting by meeting, how little of the system he is supposed to run will do what he asks. He is quick, decent and plainly out of his depth, and he does not get much done. Tolontan recedes to a face on a television in the corner, and some of the pace goes with him.
Running alongside both men is Tedy Ursuleanu, who survived the fire with severe burns and agrees to be photographed exactly as she is now. The scenes with her are quiet and unforced. We were not sure Nanau always knew what he wanted them for. He cuts to her when the paperwork gets heavy, and after a while it began to feel like a mercy for us rather than a decision about her. The other cost of leaving out captions is that a viewer without Romanian will meet several men in suits and not learn who they were until they have gone. Six words on screen would have done it.
Romanian cinema has been to these wards before. Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005) followed one old man through a night of hospitals that would not take him, and the diagnosis then was exhaustion. Nanau’s film says the system is not tired at all. It is doing exactly what somebody wants it to. It carries a 15 certificate, earned by two pieces of footage rather than by anything anyone says. Watch it with someone else on the sofa. We wanted to talk afterwards, and the film would count that as a result.
