Collective

Journalists Mirela Neag and Catalin Tolontan

There’s an All the President’s Men structure to the Romanian documentary Collective (Colectiv), with the initial field of inquiry opening up a wormhole down which the investigation dives, to find that an alternate universe has been hiding in plain sight all along. The story starts out with the bare facts, shocking enough in themselves, of a fire in a night club called Colectiv, which killed 27 people and injured many more. In the following months a further 37 people died, mostly of infections picked up in Romania’s sub-standard hospitals. Public anger initially focused on the lack of fire exits in the club and the lack of regulation by the authorities, but then shifted … Read more