Collective (2020)

Nanau’s examination of corruption within Romania’s healthcare system

Programming Note: Off next week, back Tuesday May 16.

Country: Romania

Director: Alexander Nanau

Time: 1 hour and 53 minutes

What It Evokes: Corrupt institutions, incredible access, gripping documentaries

Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($3.99 to rent)

In 2015, a fire broke out in the Bucharest nightclub Collectiv after the performing band’s pyrotechnics ignited flammable soundproofing foam covering the club’s ceiling. The fire spread throughout the space in less than 90 seconds, killing 26 people and injuring 184. Following the blaze, 146 people required hospitalization. In the weeks after the initial incident, dozens of individuals who had entered Romanian hospitals with non-life threatening burns began dying. The fire would eventually claim the lives of 64 people.

Collective, perhaps the best documentary I’ve seen since Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour (2014), tells the story of what happened next. It remains a thriller in two parts. In its first part, the film follows a group of intrepid journalists led by Cătălin Tolontan, editor of the Bucharest daily Gazeta Sporturilor, as they investigate the mounting hospital deaths. Early in the film, Tolontan and his team discover that Romanian hospitals have been using adulterated anti-bacterial disinfectants to clean wards. This information soon leads to them to uncover truly horrifying levels of corruption within the Romanian healthcare system. It’s a story replete with forged purchase orders, bribes, suspicious (non-hospital) deaths, off-shore bank accounts, whistleblowers, hospital managers lacking all qualification except useful connections, and the politicians who benefitted from it all. Thanks to dogged reporting, what had initially appeared to be a tragic story about fire safety emerged a national political crisis. If it were not true, it would be hard to pass as fiction.

Mass protests (documented in the film) throughout Romania followed Tolontan’s revelations, leading to the resignation of the country’s Social Democratic (SPD) government in late 2015. Subsequent to the government’s fall, the Romanian President—the country has a semi-presidential democracy in which prime minister and president share power—charged a former European Commissioner with assembling a new government. In turn, he enlisted a technocrat-heavy cabinet bent on reform, naming Vlad Voiculescu, a 32-year-old former patients rights’ advocate, as Health Minister. Following the new government’s assumption of power, the film’s second part focuses on Voiculescu’s attempts to redress the issues plaguing his country’s healthcare system.

Having attended medical school and practiced as a doctor in Vienna, Voiculescu remains a determined and optimistic outsider of sorts. His initial press conference opens with a commitment not to lie to journalists—a central pillar of his predecessors’ communication strategies. And his decision to afford complete access to Nanau reinforces his adherence to transparency. Yet, the catastrophic extent of double-dealing and fraud inherent in the state’s healthcare system, alongside the entrenched interests (and cynical opposition politicians) who benefit from its continuation, persistently obstruct reform. Voiculescu comes to embody one of the central challenge of politics: motivated agent meets deep-rooted structure.

I am a fairly regular person, so I recognize that the normal response to the statement, “You should absolutely see a documentary about the Romanian healthcare system,” is not, usually, “Totally. I’m going to stop everything else to watch this film.” But in spite of its (perhaps not immediately alluring) subject matter, Nanau has crafted a deeply captivating work. At base, Collective remains a political thriller laundered through the documentary format. To state the obvious, documentaries often present their directors with a different set of challenges than feature films. Access constraints tend to force narrative caesuras, requiring more or less artificial interventions to forward stories—think sit-down interviews that bridge footage. The heightened emotional resonance afforded to documentaries by virtue of their “being true” can dissipate in the face of their bricolage-like quality—if Claire Denis likes to note that all film is montage, then all standard-form documentary really is montage. These can be interesting challenges to overcome and the best documentarians tend to emerge superb editors given their material’s natural lack of propensity to “speak for itself.” In order to manage these impediments, directors often choose to overlay their films with self-conscious ruminations or remove central figures from their native contexts through follow-up interviews. (Of course, “documentary” is neither a stable, nor a particularly precise, category and filmmakers have been playing with the form since the inception of film.)

Happily, Nanau’s access allows him to transcend many of these limitations. By centering the twists and turns he captured on film, he humanizes (and elucidates) a complex institutional story through an examination of that institution’s central functionaries, antagonists, and investigators. He cleverly employs actual television news reports seen by his protagonists as informational bridges, reinforcing the film’s immediacy and verisimilitude. Working as his own cameraman, Nanau’s small crew size facilitates proximity and intimacy. His “observational” style (i.e. the near total absence of interviews, voice-over narration, on-screen text, or dramatic recreations) parallels his central figures’ faith in transparency as its own curative. Initially, Nanau began the work intent upon telling stories of the fire’s victims. In turn, this led to his introduction to the Gazeta Sporturilor’s journalists and members of the new government. (The surviving victims themselves appear throughout the film as a sort of tragic Greek chorus, continual reminders of institutional failure’s human costs.)

Collective’s two central characters form a balance of sorts throughout the work: Tolontan (the journalist) emerges an experienced and jaded presence, while Voiculescu (the Health Minister) embodies the youthful optimist. Each accepts on faith that reasonable people can achieve productive consensus when presented with factual information. Whether this faith is misplaced remains the film’s central question, as well as its own motivating thrust. We follow individual agents fighting entrenched structures under conditions of poorly informed electorates, duplicitous oppositional politicians, and institutional inertia. Their task is mammoth and Collective is not a film about righteous crusaders whose discovery of what actually happened opens redemptive future paths. Amidst imperfectly glimpsed verities, dueling media narratives, and self-imposed silences, the discovery of even the simplest forms of “truth” (i.e. ascertainable facts upon which narratives construct themselves) concerning corruption and malfeasance rarely provide hoped for panaceas. In a politics that will feel familiar to many other contexts, the SPD smears Voiculescu as a foreign-educated elitist who would rather send future burn victims abroad than use Romanian hospitals as new elections loom. It’s an effective attack line, particularly when continually played on media networks sympathetic to that party. Indeed, Collective remains a film about heroes in a world absent heroics—a work whose greatest strength lies in articulating the many barriers to institutional change that encumber well-meaning and dogged reformers. If the world needs more Tolontans and Voiculescus, then it benefits from works of art that celebrate their existence.

Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:

Alexander Nanau — The World According to Ion B. (2009)

Alexander Nanau — Toto and His Sisters (2014)