Balkans: Typographic Capital Letters

Bucharest, Romania

Gianina Carbunariu (b. 1977), a ground-breaking author and director who is one of the most influential figures in her homeland, stages a unique political thriller which is simultaneously a Romanian version of the film "The lives of others" and a spectacle on the cusp between fiction and documentary. Throwing open the secret files of the Securitate, she sheds light on a practice common until the overthrow and execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989: the interrogation of adolescents.

Gianina Cărbunariu has chosen to work on the case of Mugur Călinescu (28 May 1965 – 13 February 1985), who was just 17 years and a pupil at A.T. Laurian High School in Botoşani when, in September 1981, he alerted the departments of the Securitate for a month because he wrote on panels and walls inscriptions intended to arouse in people a reaction to the way the rights and freedoms of citizens were being flagrantly disregarded, and to the disastrous state of the Romanian economy in that period. After Mugur was caught, he was continuously asked to come to the Securitate. Two years after the September 1981 episode, Mugur Călinescu fell ill with leukaemia. He died in 1985.

The director Gianina Cărbunariu notes: “Alongside documents written in the wooden language of the oppressive apparatus of the period (plans for measures, informative notes, analytic notes, etc.), the 200 pages of dossier no. 738 concerning “the Pupil” also preserve the declarations of a young man who succeeded in remaining faithful to his own convictions in spite of the pressures of the Securitate and the lack of solidarity shown by those around him. I believe that young people need models that they can understand, and Mugur Călinescu is, from this point of view, a necessary model of attitude”.

The show "Typographic Capital Letters" was created in the framework of the project "Parallel Lives - 20th Century through the Eyes of Secret Police” for the International Theatre Festival Divadelná Nitra (Slovakia), a festival that connects artists, co-producers and cooperating institutions from six countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

Artists from former socialist countries created six theatre productions based on the study of materials preserved in the archives of secret police organizations operating in former Soviet bloc countries. Authentic stories intersperse with interviews with the witnesses to that era, agents, victims and other people whose lives had been affected by the activities of the secret police.