Collective
Colectiv
Alexander Nanau (2019)
On 30th October 2015 a fire broke out at the Club Colectiv in Bucharest during a performance by the metalcore band Goodbye to Gravity. Twenty-seven people lost their lives there that night; more than 180 were injured. Almost immediately, the tragedy was recognised as a consequence of the malpractice widely seen as endemic to Romanian public life: the club, which had only one fire exit, had been granted an operating licence in spite of having no fire safety accreditation. Mass demonstrations led to the resignation of the country’s Social Democrat government within a few days of the fire. (All members of the replacement government appointed by the President of Romania and led by the agronomist Dacian Cioloș were ‘technocrats’, none of them formally affiliated with any political organisation.) A further 37 of the injured subsequently died in hospital, some as a result of grossly inadequate healthcare that also reflected systemic corruption. In his documentary Collective (recently shown in BBC4’s Storyville slot), Alexander Nanau charts how journalists, chiefly Cătălin Tolontan, exposed the extent of wrongdoing in this next phase of the Colectiv scandal, and the unrelenting political turbulence that ensued.
From the very start, the camera – Nanau is also the cinematographer – is in the thick of the action, as it happens. The terrier-like Tolontan is first seen at a press conference where victims’ parents describe their children’s suffering and death in the weeks following the fire. (Regardless of whether this was the actual start of Tolontan’s involvement in the case, that’s what Nanau, in effect, suggests.) This is followed by the film’s only flashback, a video shot on someone’s phone inside the Colectiv on the fatal night. The footage conveys the fire’s terrifyingly rapid spread. Andrei Găluț, Goodbye to Gravity’s vocalist, stops singing when he notices ‘a problem’; seconds later, the whole place is engulfed in flames. (Though the film doesn’t mention this, Găluț was the only one of the group’s five members to survive the fire.) From this point on, Nanau moves forward single-mindedly, capturing the growing momentum of Tolontan’s investigation in tandem with the expanding scale of the misconduct it reveals. Patients died in Romanian hospitals that lacked the facilities needed to offer proper treatment to burns victims. Some succumbed to bacterial infections that might have been prevented if the disinfectants used hadn’t been diluted by a national supplier, Hex Pharma, to 10% of their supposed strength.
Without sensationalising, Nanau has crafted a non-fiction narrative that’s intensely dramatic – to a degree rare in fictional film dramas. The accumulating evidence of iniquity exerts a terrible grip. Some of the significant figures in the story make their entrance and an impression, reappear and have a different impact. Tedy Ursuleanu, a young woman who survived the fire despite very serious burns, is the subject of an extraordinary photo shoot and the centre of attention at the opening of an exhibition of the images of her face and body, then is seen learning to use a prosthetic hand. Dan Condrea, the Hex Pharma chief executive, is a shadowy figure glimpsed two three times in long shot. Soon after the launch of a criminal investigation into his activities, Condrea dies in a car crash, which may have been an accident or suicide or murder. Patriciu Achimaș-Cadariu, the initial health minister appointment in the Cioloș government, presides at two press conferences. At the first, he smoothly insists that testing of the Hex Pharma disinfectants has shown them to be 95% effective. At the second, he announces his resignation, gets up and leaves: no further questions.
Collective repeatedly illustrates the penetration of corruption – or, at least, of the resigned acceptance of corruption – within the Romanian political establishment, health system and perhaps even the press. Camelia Riou, a hospital doctor and whistleblower who contacts Tolontan’s team with video of a Colectiv burns victim whose head wounds are crawling with worms, is presented as a fearless rarity within her profession. Foul-mouthed hospital manager Florin Secureanu is brought to book for embezzling hospital funds but the whistleblower in this case may have been fed up with her boss’s verbal threats and abuse rather than appalled by his fraud. (Secureanu can’t help looking like a thug but this is a case where appearances evidently aren’t deceptive. He’s also a university professor and – you couldn’t make it up – a member of the national Anti-corruption Directorate.) Tolontan works for Gazeta Sporturilor, a Romanian daily that, as its name makes clear, is primarily a sports newspaper. It’s the country’s highest-profile journal of its kind but its unique coverage of the Colectiv aftermath is, someone suggests, testimony to the pusillanimity of mainline investigative journalism in Romania.
Achimaș-Cadariu’s successor as health minister is Vlad Voiculescu. This pale, bespectacled, unremarkable-looking man – a technocrat who’s the picture of a bureaucrat – also gradually succeeds Tolontan as the film’s protagonist, and emerges as its other hero. The physical and temperamental contrasts between Tolontan and Voiculescu are compelling. The journalist is solid, pugnacious and imperturbably articulate, in television discussions as well as, one assumes, in print. For a while, Voiculescu, who introduces himself at his first ministerial press conference as a former patients’ rights activist, seems hesitant, maybe out of his depth. Yet his keen intelligence, tenacity and growing realisation of the impossibility of achieving thoroughgoing reform, are an increasingly impressive combination.
Collective features no talking heads of the usual documentary kind (Tedy Ursuleanu’s damaged face is more than eloquent without words, though she has poignant things to say, too). By largely eschewing considered retrospection, Nanau maximises his film’s powerful immediacy but also leaves himself open to criticism of not supplying enough context. He doesn’t, for example, explain the cause of the fire (Goodbye to Gravity’s pyrotechnics show ignited the Club Colectiv’s flammable acoustic foam); or whether Gazeta Sporturilor, despite its main focus, has covered non-sporting stories before; or, if so, whether Tolontan and his key colleagues, the solemnly persistent Mirela Neag and Răzvan Luţac, have previous experience in such journalism. Although it would have helped to be told these things, I think Nanau’s approach is justified, and not only because, in Romania, the details of the Colectiv disaster and what followed are no doubt already well known. His film runs close to two hours as it is: Nanau had to make hard choices about what to include.
For anyone who (like me) narrowly assumed the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election results to be the full extent of democratic lunacy on the planet in 2016, Collective delivers a vicious sting in the tail. The Social Democratic Party (PSD) wins that December’s general election – and wins big. A radio news bulletin reports dismally low turnout among younger voters. If the final official figures were anything like those mentioned here, this seems to be another instance of political cynicism being its own reward[1]. We watch Vlad Voiculescu absorb the results but Alexander Nanau returns finally to the people he started with, bereaved families visiting the graves of their loved ones at Christmas 2016. I get vexed when the praise accorded a screen drama reflects the importance of its subject matter rather than its dramatic quality. This documentary scores sky-high in both departments. It’s exceptionally powerful cinema.
20 April 2021
[1] That said, post-Ceaușescu Romania is an electorally volatile place. In December 2016, the PSD still fell short of an absolute parliamentary majority. The resulting coalition lasted only a few months and there were four subsequent administrations between 2017 and 2020. In the current coalition government, headed by Florin Cîțu, Vlad Voiculescu resumed the Minister of Health portfolio. He was fired by Cîțu just a few days before I watched Collective, apparently in the light of issues around his department’s handling of Romania’s response to Covid.