90 minutes, Color/BW, English/Romanian/French/Hebrew

Filmmaker Irene Lusztig unearths a dark family secret in search of answers and reconciliation in her breakthrough feature documentary, RECONSTRUCTION. In communist Romania 1959, Lusztig’s maternal grandmother, Monica Sevianu, took part in a failed bank robbery (known as the Ioanid Gang bank heist) and was condemned to life in prison. Forty years later, Lusztig returns to Bucharest to reassemble the pieces of her controversial story and construct a portrait of her enigmatic grandmother. The title of the documentary is derived from a bizarre government propaganda film that reenacts the crime and trial of the robbery and shockingly stars the actual members of the Ioanid Gang – including Monica Sevianu. Combining interviews, contemporary footage shot in Bucharest and rare archival images, Lusztig investigates the subversive crime of six Jewish intellectuals, revealing a mesmerizing family story spanning three generations while presenting a compelling and complex examination of modern-day Romania.

While Reconstruction begins as an intimate family story, it gradually expands into a more complex essaystic meditation on how a regime invents itself through the images it produces, an exploration of representation, reality, and authoritarianism in which, ultimately, images become deadly weapons.