Collective
Screening Heralded as one of the most important films about journalism ever made, Collective is an unflinching and unbelievable look at how a nightclub fire brought down the Romanian government.
Alexander Nanau | Romania | 2019 | Unclassified 15+
A masterpiece about power, corruption and lies. – Variety
It started with a fire. In 2015, metalcore band Goodbye to Gravity were playing a concert at Colectiv nightclub when pyrotechnics ignited part of the building leading to a horrific disaster that initially left 26 people dead. However, over the coming days and months an additional 38 victims would die in hospitals despite some of them only having burns to 10 to 15 per cent of their bodies. Another 146 would suffer from excruciating and permanent injuries, leading investigative journalists from daily sports newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor to start looking into exactly what was happening in their supposedly state of the art hospitals.
Filmmaker Alexander Nanau is embedded with the team as they begin to uncover not one scandal, but an entire infrastructure built around them. Even within the realm of critically acclaimed non-fiction, Collective’s reviews have been borderline hysterical since its debut at the Venice Film Festival for a reason. Dubbed “a masterpiece” by Rolling Stone, its nearest points of comparison are not other documentaries, but rather narrative features like All The President’s Men and Spotlight because the story is just so sensational. It reads like a Stieg Larsson novel with the plot twists, horrific deaths, suspicious suicides, and mix of both insidious and righteous characters utterly captivating.
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