During the 1980s, the American journalist Edward Serotta documented the harsh realities and Jewish life in socialist Romania. The secret services clandestinely accompanied him on his journey. A photo essay from opposing perspectives.

A photo album bears silent witness to history. Handsomely bound and carefully labelled, it traces the path of the 6th Regiment of the Romanian army in the war years of 1941 and 1942. Romania had allied itself with Nazi Germany to fight the Soviet army. This film soberly dissects the perspective of these war photographs. Making use of quotations from historical sources, it puts these banal images of everyday military life in a larger context, supplementing that which has been deliberately left out.

On June 29, 1941, the Jewish residents of the city of Iasi were rounded up and beaten, shops and homes were looted, and most of the men were shot or crowded onto trains, where they later died of asphyxiation. While Germans took part in the pogrom, the majority of the perpetrators were Romanian policemen, military officers and civilians. How can a film deal with this crime? Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflâncă have opted for a radical, pared-down approach: their film lists the names of those who died from A to Z, illustrating them with photographs from passports and family albums. Astoundingly sober accounts are heard in voiceover. Through repetition, accumulation and variation, the filmmakers make the scale of the atrocity tangible, allow nuances to emerge and give the number of victims – 13,000 – concrete form, until, at the end, after about two-and-a-half hours, they draw on an entirely different visual register.