The Dead Nation

A documentary-essay, Țara moartă shows a collection of photographs from a small Romanian town in the 1930s and 1940s. The soundtrack, composed mostly of excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, depicts what the photographs do not: the rising of antisemitism and eventually the harrowing depiction of the Romanian persecution of the Jews, a subject rarely talked in contemporary Romania. (Locarno Festival)