The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu. 2010. Romania/Germany. Directed by Andrei Ujică. 35mm courtesy the Film Desk. In Romanian; English subtitles. 180 min.
Andrei Ujică’s magisterial film stitches together 24 years of state propaganda images of the Romanian dictator and his wife, Elena—painstakingly choreographed pageants, diplomatic visits, party congresses, and unconvincingly merry scenes of home life—into an expansive vision of a nation in thrall to, and at the mercy of, a cult leader. Drawing on archival material that inadvertently reveals moments excised from the sanctioned narrative, Ujică illuminates the fissures and tensions that would lead to the Ceauşescus’ execution by firing squad on Christmas Day 1989. As J. Hoberman observed in The New York Review of Books, “In Cannes, Ujică told interviewers that, for him, The Autobiography was a form of therapy. In effect, his first movie to be made in Romania enabled him to return to his home and reconstruct Ceauşescu’s Potemkin village from its celluloid shards. The result is as monumental as it is ephemeral, and not without a certain ghastly pathos. The misery of Ceauşescu’s dreadful misrule that is the movie’s structuring absence is amplified by the manufactured delusions foisted on a suffering nation.”