Sahia Film

Shells Have Never Spoken is a black and white documentary film made in 1962 by Sergiu Nicolaescu. It is the first Romanian underwater film.

“Wedding in Leresti: American couple gets married in the Orthodox tradition as local priest is appointed Texan sheriff” – this was the title of a feature published in the August 1973 issue of Tribuna României, a trilingual (French-English-German) Romanian publication targeted at foreign audiences. The unusual event was documented in a Sahia film commissioned by Publiturism, the media arm of Romania’s National Tourism Office, which credited Paul Anghel, the editor-in-chief of the periodical, as scriptwriter.

This is one of hundreds of so-called „ephemeral” films produced by the documentary studio in the wake of serious accidents on Romania’s roads. As was always the case in such films, the guilty party is the driver himself – one of the aims of this category of film was to assign unequivocal guilt. Yet, what makes this coarse lesson, brought to life by actors and non-professionals, more relevant today than it was at the time of its production is its ability to capture more than the event itself and thereby to provide us with a glimpse of the period in which it was produced.

Sahia also picked up commercial work from time to time. In this case, literally; a movie stuntman sells personal injury insurance to onlookers. Included as an extra on the Sahia Vintage DVDs.

People Telling Stories is an industrial, health-and-safety commission turned into an aesthetic exercise by one of the most flamboyant young directors at Sahia. In the early 1980s, Romania experienced a crisis triggered by the so-called ‘Transcendental Movement’ (a variation of the ‘Transcendental Meditation’ movement created by Maharishi Yogi, with some significant involvement from the Romanian Secret Police). Those involved, most of them members of the intellectual elite, were harshly repressed. One of them was Paștina, who lost his right to make documentaries for cinema distribution and was demoted to directing health-and-safety films commissioned to Sahia by various institutions.

Little Ones Describe the Big World is not so much relevant as a sample of the directorial work of filmmaker Gabriel Barta as much as it is as an example of the early writing of one of Romania’s most peculiar and prolific writers, Radu Cosașu, who, at the time, worked closely with the Sahia studio after going through a difficult patch with the political establishment. The film is structured through the father-daughter dialogue written by Cosașu to lend colour and a narrative to the aforementioned exhibition. The style of his writing combines the wit, irony, and casual tone that have become his trademark: here, however, these qualities are put to work for the benefit of the socialist state’s political agenda.

Short documentary about working-class Romanians.

On the banks of Ozana follows the lives of children who dedicate their time to agricultural work.