Movies Similar to Brass on Fire

Children of the Decree(2005)

Procreation is the social duty of all fertile women, was the political thinking during the 1960s and 1970s in Romania. In 1966, Ceaucescu issued Decree 770, in which he forbade abortion for all women unless they were over forty or were already taking care of four children. All forms of contraception were totally banned. The New Romanian Man was born. By 1969, the country had a million babies more than the previous average. Romanian society was rapidly changing. By using very interesting archival footage and excerpts from old fiction films and by interviewing famous personalities from that time – gynecologists or mothers who were part of the new society - the director revives this period of tremendous oppression of personal freedom. Many deaths were caused by the mere fact that women, including wives of secret Romanian agents, famous TV presenters, and actresses, had to undergo illegal abortions. Many women were jailed for having them.

6.0

We Feed the World(2005)

A documentary that exposes the shocking truths behind industrial food production and food wastage, focusing on fishing, livestock and crop farming. A must-see for anyone interested in the true cost of the food on their plate.

7.3

The Second Game(2014)

A deceptively simple set-up: the director and his father watch a 1988 football match which the father refereed, their commentary accompanying the original television images in real time. A Bucharest derby between the country’s leading teams, Dinamo and Steaua, taking place in heavy snow, one year before the revolution that toppled Ceaușescu.

5.6

The Dead Nation(2017)

A documentary-essay which shows Costică Axinte's stunning collection of pictures depicting a Romanian small town in the thirties and forties. The narration, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, tells the rising of the antisemitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust.

6.5

Nadia Comăneci: The Gymnast and the Dictator(2016)

A documentary portrait of legendary Perfect Ten gymnast Nadia Comaneci after becoming an icon in the 1976 Olympics, during her Romanian period, and her challenging years under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu.

8.6

The World According to Ion B.(2009)

The fascinating portrait of Ion Bârlàdeanu. The touching and inspiring story of a man who literally lived in the gutter for 20 years - and in the meantime managed to create paintings and collages which are now exhibited alongside works by Andy Warhol or Marcel Duchamp.

8.0

Dictator: One Crazy Job(2013)

They’ve become the human face of inhuman barbarity. Leaders like Hitler, Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Bokassa, Muammar Kadhafi, Khomeini, Mussolini and Franco governed their countries completely cut off from reality. These paranoid leaders were driven to abuse their power by the pathology of power itself. Dictators are driven by a relentless, thought-out determination to impose themselves as infallible, all-knowing and all-powerful beings. But they are also men ruled by their caprices, uncontrollable impulses, and reckless fits of frenzy, which paradoxically render them as human as anyone else. The abuses they committed were clearly atrocious, yet some of them were as outlandish as the characters portrayed in the film The Dictator. They sunk to depths worthy of Kafka: so incredibly absurd, they are outrageously funny.

6.5

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu(2010)

The three-hour-long documentary covers 25 years in the life of Nicolae Ceaușescu and was made using 1,000 hours of original footage from the National Archives of Romania.

7.7

Untamed Romania(2018)

Untamed Romania provides insight into the stunning natural wonders of Romania, with the Carpathian Mountains, the Danube Delta, and Transylvania as its major areas of interest.

8.0

Adolescence(1969)

"This wonderful age in life where every thought strives toward an ideal, toward work, toward the future." Sahia Studios propaganda flick about how adults and their "those darn kids" attitudes affect adolescents.

6.0

Our Holy War(1942)

A documentary about World War II, also known as the "Holy War" while Romania was an ally to Nazi Germany. The propagandistic nature of the film is evident through its overt anti-semitism and ultra-nationalist tone.

0.0

When Borat Came to Town(2008)

A look at what happened after Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan was filmed in the Romanian village of Glod. It follows the life of one girl who longs to escape the poverty as foreign lawyers arrive with the promise of suing 20th Century Fox for millions of dollars.

6.1

They Are Here

Dangling from a high window, a young non-binary person is on the cusp of life and death. Flashes of film, literature, art (paintings) and cultural history pass them by, as if to tell a message. A postmodern treatise on connection to culture and the past.

0.0

No Festival(2020)

Due to a pandemic, the Electric Castle music festival shifts into an intimate concert staged for cameras instead, with three bands and no live audience.

6.0

Nostalgia dictaturii(2020)

Several decades after the collapse of the communist system, nostalgia for the former regime has reached unimaginable proportions in almost all former communist European countries. The documentary Nostalgia for Dictatorship does not limit itself to presenting this genuine syndrome of "longing for dictatorship", but, in parallel with the opinions and motivations of ordinary citizens living in the former communist space, it advances explanations by researchers from various fields, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, ethologists, etc., regarding the intimate motivations of such a paradoxical feeling.

0.0

The Certainty of Probabilities(2021)

1968, The Socialist Republic of Romania. Women catch up on the latest tendencies in beachwear, the young hippies of Hamburg are harshly criticized by Romanian students, while Nicolae Ceaușescu reads the famous defiance speech against the intervention of the Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia. Floating solemnly over all this is The Internationale, sung on a stadium by a crowd of pioneers dressed in white shirts and red ties. A certainty for each probability: the documentary is at the same time a history lesson and an ideological warning sign, the director’s endeavour permanently draws our attention to the functions of the propaganda film, yet without tarnishing the fascination that dwells in the core of the images, that of the figures that wave at us from a past buried in commonplaces and political parti pris.

6.0

Carol I(2009)

The last days of the first Romanian king, Carol I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, and the tough decisions he had to make in the summer of 1914 in order to please both Romanian Parliament and his relatives from the German Empire.

8.2

Open files(1975)

A more experimental aproach to labor protection films. In the line of Săucan's style, the soundtrack is as important as the image, the threatening music, full of shrillness, composed by Ion Dumitrescu potentiating the visual construction that mixes - in a montage reminiscent of the Soviet avant-garde school of the 1920s - all kinds of shooting techniques and frame combinations.

0.0

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Come Find Me(2020)

After the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, over 100,000 children were discovered living in Romanian orphanages. Follow Nori Vito, one of those orphans, as she journeys from her adopted American home to Romania and Greece to find the family she lost almost 30 years ago.

8.0

Cabbage, Potatoes and other Demons(2017)

1 village, 1.000 tractors, 100.000 tons of cabbages & potatoes each year - which are hardly sold and eventually destroyed. Is there any way out?

6.0