Collective

Director Alexander Nanau follows a crack team of investigators at the Romanian newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor as they try to uncover a vast health-care fraud that enriched moguls and politicians and led to the deaths of innocent citizens. Immediately following the film there will be a pre-recorded discussion between filmmaker Nanau and Rolling Stone critic Kameron Austin Collin.

In a year of remarkable documentaries Alexander Nanau’s Collective may be the strongest of them all. It’s about lethal government corruption, in this case in democratic Romania but as we know the ‘swamp’ is everywhere. The film begins with the sudden fatal fire in a packed Bucharest nightclub, Collective, and goes from awful to an even worse actuality in the Bucharest hospitals. Manohla Dargis praising  this staggering film in The New York Times wrote,  “…it lays out with an anguished detail and a profound, moving sense of decency, (that) it takes stubborn angry people – journalists, politicians, artists, activists – to hammer at the arc (of justice) until it starts bending, maybe, in the right direction.’ ” –Laurence Kardish, FilmColumbia co-artistic director and former senior film curator at MoMA