... and be overwhelmed by a machination of maggots. A jaw dropping, eye opening and almost unbelievable documentary focusing on the endemic and systemic corruption discovered by journalists after sixty four people died as a result of a nightclub fire in Bucharest 2015. Plumbing the depths of depravity, and continuing to reach deeper as each minute ticks by, you will feel for the people of Romania and the betrayal perpetrated against them by their elected officials and civil servants.

This might appear to Western audiences as a great piece of investigative journalism, and it is, but for Romanians it is a terrible thing to see. It's not like we haven't all talked about the abysmal state of the medical system in the country, it's not like we don't know the level of corruption at every level, but to witness it unveiling before our eyes is extremely distressing and painful. What makes it worse is that it presents a young minister of Medicine as a political hero, when we know he actually succeeded nothing of what he set out to do and, off record, he was among the people accusing the whistleblower of being dishonest or mentally unstable.

And to top it all up, we know that from the time the investigation took place (2015) to the time the movie was released (2019) and to now (2021),nothing has changed in any meaningful way. The woman that blew the whistle on the terrible state of the Burn hospital in Bucharest still works there (no one else would hire her) and still has the same bosses, with a new improved manager who accuses her of doctoring the video of maggots crawling over a burn victim's wounds. None of the people responsible or even partially condemned have served any sentences (one was reelected as the mayor of a sector of the capital city Bucharest) as their cases are still stuck in the legal bureaucratic machine. And not much has changed in the expectations of regular people, either. They all know that in order to have any chance for a mediocre treatment they have to bribe the people involved and never expect any kindness or increase in quality other than maybe a prioritization of their case. The system is still there, unchanged, strangling us to death.

For me the documentary was doubly terrifying, once for being a Romanian that might some day be sent into the nightmarish "system" from which few survive unscathed (or alive) and once again for recognizing the failures of the system from the film in my own experience. And I am a corporate man, working for Western countries in large and well known organizations. The feeling that it's not just a budget thing, or a Romanian thing and that it is a global thing resulting from human nature itself it extremely depressing.

Is it a perfect film? No. Sometimes it shows the bias of the investigators, things like their political stance or comments about the face of some guy they investigate for fraud and corruption. But that makes it also feel more raw, more honest. The investigators are not paragons of virtue, they are people like you and me and they are trying their best to do their job. There is a lot lost in translation, too. The HBO English subtitles are sanitized and incomplete, failing to convey the frustration, anger and violence in the people involved. Ridiculously, there was no option for Romanian subtitles, which makes me wonder how exactly did they get the English ones. The pacing is also all over the place and one can understand how difficult it would have been for the film makers to edit material that was kind of one sided and it is pretty obvious that people behave slightly unnatural, knowing they are in front of cameras.

Bottom line: it is a raw painful experience to watch this film. There is no joy in it, no closure, just people trying to fight the system by revealing it to the world in all of its ugliness. And they lose. That's the ugly truth.

I interpreted Alexander Nanau's Academy Award-nominated "Colectiv" as the same sort of work as "Spotlight". Much like how the latter exposed the rape of children and the widespread conspiracy to hide it, this documentary exposes fraud in Romania's healthcare system, and looks at current efforts to fix things. As the documentary makes clear, fixing things will be no easy task.

The expose came from Catalin Tolontan, a writer for a sports magazine. The footage of Tolontan's work gets interspersed with footage of Tedy Ursuleanu, who survived the fire but remains disfigured. Much like how the coronavirus exposed myriad problems in US society that we had been ignoring, the Colectiv fire exposed a major problem in Romanian society that people had been ignoring. What remains to be seen is whether or not the problem can get fixed.

Definitely see this.