Culture
Brașov 1987-Two Years Too Early, a film by Liviu Tofan – a documentary evidence
Today the freedom of speech is taken for granted and it is no longer an issue in Romania, a place
where 30 years ago it would have been unimaginable to walk freely on the streets and demand
justice, under the communist regime. 30 years ago one would stay long hours in winding queues
in order to buy food and supplements for the family, in times of hunger, when electricity and
warm water were rather a luxury.
Rezist Zürich , a non-profit organization from Zurich, whose main objective is to fight the corruption in Romania,
together with DocuArt, and with the support of film director Liviu Tofan,who was the director of the Romanian news section of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, in the 1980’s, presented the documentary Brașov 1987-Two Years Too Early last weekend, to an international audience as part of their project “Romania. The promise of change” Daniel Ursprung, historian at the Chair of Eastern European History at the University of Zurich, gave an introduction to the documentary.
Brașov 1987-Two Years Too Early, a film by Liviu Tofan
The film sheds light on the first anti-communist rebellion in the history of Romania, in 1987, a rebellion that prefigurated the outcome of December 1989 in Timișoara, when the Ceaușescu regime finally collapsed. Despite its unique significance, the uprising of the factory workers is almost unknown, as the regime did everything in its power to hide and annihilate all evidences. Even though images from the revolt appeared at that time, in the French newspaper Libération, the authorities managed to cover all the tracks.
Liviu Tofan`s film Brașov 1987-Two Years Too Early is a tribute to the victims of communism, whose desperate audacity was a miniature prefiguration of the Romanian revolution in 1989 and inherently the transition from communism to the values of democracy. This year Romanians remember 32 years since the anti-communist uprising of the workers in Brașov.
Some of the protagonists are the workers who were cruelly beaten during interrogations. One can identify scars on their faces even after thirty years since those tragic events. The documentary is a tribute to them, to the sufferings they had to endure during those events and long after, while they were exiled or put in jail.
‘We’re in a dire need of recovering our historical memory’ said Liviu Tofan. Brașov 1987- Two Years Too Early is ´a documentary through which we can tell the younger generations what happened back then, a documentary to stand as evidence’. The freedom of speech is not for granted and it is our duty to keep alive the memories.