A version of this story about “Collective” first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
The Oscar category of Best Documentary was once a reliable safe haven for homegrown American films, but in recent years it has gone international. Since 2015, there have been at least one, and often two, non-English-language titles among the nominees. Films like Italy’s “Fire at Sea,” France’s “Faces Places,” and Brazil’s “The Edge of Democracy” have told stories not with an outsider’s eye, but from within the counties and cultures in which they take place.
But no film had ever been nominated for Best Documentary and Best International Feature Film (formerly known as Best Foreign Language Film) until North Macedonia’s “Honeyland” turned that trick last year. This year the doubleheader occurred again with Alexander Nanau’s “Collective,” an accomplishment that was even more notable considering...
The Oscar category of Best Documentary was once a reliable safe haven for homegrown American films, but in recent years it has gone international. Since 2015, there have been at least one, and often two, non-English-language titles among the nominees. Films like Italy’s “Fire at Sea,” France’s “Faces Places,” and Brazil’s “The Edge of Democracy” have told stories not with an outsider’s eye, but from within the counties and cultures in which they take place.
But no film had ever been nominated for Best Documentary and Best International Feature Film (formerly known as Best Foreign Language Film) until North Macedonia’s “Honeyland” turned that trick last year. This year the doubleheader occurred again with Alexander Nanau’s “Collective,” an accomplishment that was even more notable considering...
- 4/16/2021
- by Joe McGovern
- The Wrap
When documentary maker Alexander Nanau started filming a team of investigative journalists in the aftermath of a tragic fire, no one knew the staggering level of corruption they would uncover. The blaze at Bucharest’s Colectiv club in 2015 left 27 dead and 180 injured. When more burn victims began dying in hospitals from wounds that were not life-threatening, the Romanian newspaper Sports Gazette started probing into the health service.
In Collective, this year’s Oscar-shortlisted International Feature from Romania, Nanau’s camera follows the team closely as they chase leads and hear from whistleblowers with blood-chilling accusations, ranging from fatal negligence to organized bribery and record falsifying. It becomes clear that the victims were far from safe in the very hospitals that politicians had been boasting about. This is riveting, heartbreaking stuff, and the drama continues to unfold.
As the national media picks up on the story, Nanau films politicians blundering at press conferences,...
In Collective, this year’s Oscar-shortlisted International Feature from Romania, Nanau’s camera follows the team closely as they chase leads and hear from whistleblowers with blood-chilling accusations, ranging from fatal negligence to organized bribery and record falsifying. It becomes clear that the victims were far from safe in the very hospitals that politicians had been boasting about. This is riveting, heartbreaking stuff, and the drama continues to unfold.
As the national media picks up on the story, Nanau films politicians blundering at press conferences,...
- 2/17/2021
- by Anna Smith
- Deadline Film + TV
Romanian director Alexander Nanau’s bracing, relentless documentary tracks the aftermath of the 2015 fire that killed 64 people, hovering at the center of a system on the verge of collapse. And then it does, much like the flames that engulfed Bucharest’s Colectiv nightclub and sent the nation into a tailspin, as “Collective” sits at the center of the chaos with an unflinching gaze.
Nanau adopts a remarkable vérité approach to the material that, outside of some brief introductory credits, lets the footage speak for itself. From its opening moments to the devastating finale, “Collective” plays like a gripping real-time thriller, merging the reportorial intensity of “Spotlight” with the paranoid uncertainty of “The Manchurian Candidate” as it explores the national fallout of a tragedy that won’t let up.
“Collective” doesn’t dwell much on the terror of its inciting incident, dispensing of the nightclub event in amateur video from the...
Nanau adopts a remarkable vérité approach to the material that, outside of some brief introductory credits, lets the footage speak for itself. From its opening moments to the devastating finale, “Collective” plays like a gripping real-time thriller, merging the reportorial intensity of “Spotlight” with the paranoid uncertainty of “The Manchurian Candidate” as it explores the national fallout of a tragedy that won’t let up.
“Collective” doesn’t dwell much on the terror of its inciting incident, dispensing of the nightclub event in amateur video from the...
- 11/19/2020
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
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