Hard-hitting documentary following a damning investigation into the aftermath of a tragic fire in a Romanian club—one that reveals health care fraud, mass corruption, and the deaths of innocent citizens.
In 2015, a fire at Bucharest's Colectiv club leaves 27 dead and 180 injured. Soon, more burn victims begin dying in hospitals from wounds that were not life-threatening. Then a doctor blows the whistle to a team of investigative journalists. One revelation leads to another as the journalists start to uncover vast health care fraud. When a new health minister is appointed, he offers unprecedented access to his efforts to reform the corrupt system but also to the obstacles he faces. Following journalists, whistle-blowers, burn victims, and government officials, Collective is an uncompromising look at the impact of investigative journalism at its best.
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The result is, quite simply, a stunning achievement. Nanau’s access is extraordinary, his storytelling unerring, and like Tolontan and Voiculescu, he never loses his nerve. If you ever wondered what speaking truth to power really looks like, look no further.
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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.
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The cynicism and indifference to suffering is truly horrible, and a kind of insidious evil rises from the screen like carbon monoxide, and also a terrible sadness.
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Alexander Nanau's Collective has a propulsive energy, relentlessly building in urgency and outrage.
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In its narrative tautness, this documentary can hold its own alongside the best of Romania’s contemporary fiction.
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The film reminds us that without investigative reporting there’s no democracy, and that traditional expectations around impartiality and objectivity may be untenable in the face of horror.
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It’s a taut, intense procedural, with a resonant story that simultaneously follows a journalistic investigation and an attempt to fix a fatally dysfunctional medical bureaucracy...
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Gripping, incisive and shockingly powerful, Collective is easily the documentary of the year.
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