THE GREAT COMMUNIST BANK ROBBERY

A film by Alexandru Solomon

Romania/France, 2004

BBC

The Great Communist Bank Robbery

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/great-communist-bank-robbery.shtml

The bizarre story of how a Romanian bank raid in the 1950s became a chilling piece of proto-reality television - Stalinist style.

Nick Fraser

Storyville Series Editor

In 1959 there was robbery at the Romanian National Bank in Bucharest. This was a peculiar occurrence since the local currency (the lei) could only be spent inside Romania, and bank robberies, along with most other kinds of crimes, were presumed not to happen in the socialist utopia.

The Romanian police scoured the country and ultimately arrested six people who they declared to be guilty.

After confessing, the robbers agreed to re-enact their crime. An hour-long film was made in which they duly played themselves. There is some evidence that they thought by so doing they would be spared a death sentence. But after trial, also filmed, they were shot.

Alexandru Solomon's film is both a bizarre recreation of a crime of which the motive is still difficult to fathom and an astonishing evocation of a lost world of Romanian Stalinism.

It may not have been pleasant to live in 1950s Romania, but the images in the film have an eerie beauty.