On September 18 1959, my fourteen-year-old mother watched as the Romanian Securitate (secret police) burst into her home and arrested her mother and stepfather. No explanation was given for the mysterious and traumatic arrests: only months later did my mother learn that her parents, Monica Alfandary Sevianu, and Igor "Gugu" Sevianu, together with four other men, had been tried and condemned for their alleged involvement in the hold-up of an armored car transporting over a million lei in state money to a branch of the Romanian National Bank. My grandmother Monica was the only woman involved in the hold-up, and the only member of the group who escaped without a death sentence. Five years into her life sentence, she was set free by the political amnesty of 1964. She returned to her family and children, and eventually managed to immigrate to Israel, where she died in 1977.
My film Reconstruction uses the event of the 1959 bank heist as a point of departure for an examination of present day Romania as a landscape scarred by its history, struggling with the legacy of its past. My grandmother's story, as told through interviews with her surviving friends and relatives, archival footage, and contemporary footage shot in Romania, becomes a metaphor for a search for historical truth that, while elusive and highly subjective, is also critically important for present-day Romania, as it struggles with its painful transition from communist dictatorship to democracy. Mirroring this broader idea of a nation's search for historical truth is my family's more intimate search for truth: my mother's search as she tries for the first time to confront her childhood and to understand what led her mother to abandon two young children for a suicidal act of politcal theater, and my own search to understand this painful chapter in history as a second generation Romanian-American seeing Romania for the first time.
The "Ioanid Gang" bank heist was by all accounts one of the most controversial political cases in the history of Romanian communism. That anyone would even consider masterminding a bank hold-up in a society where owning money was a stigma and police surveillance was unrelenting was inconceivable. The fact that all six "gangsters" were prominent Jewish intellectuals and former underground communists made the incident even more fantastical. The crime, the arrest, the closed trial, and the fact that five men were executed for an economic crime created a tremendous sensation in Bucharest. But even more sinister was the subsequent Party decision to arrange the shooting of a feature-length propaganda film called Reconstituirea (Re-enactment), a so-called documentary produced by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (described by one of my interviewees as a "gruesome case of cinema verité"). Instead of professional actors, the six convicts themselves were forced - either drugged or lured by the false promise that their death sentences would be commuted to life - to re-enact the official version of their own crime and arrest on film. When Party members and journalists were invited to closed screenings of this film in 1960-61, the macabre production sent shock waves into the ranks of the Party. Reconstruction uses footage from this old film (a rare and horrifying archival film, which had never been screened outside of Romania) as an armature for a new film, which re-examines the events of a story that has been suppressed by the Romanian government for over forty years.
Reconstruction
is constructed as a description of two parallel journeys (both physical
and emotional) that converge at the end of the film. The first is my own
journey as a filmmaker and researcher, as I try to assemble a portrait
of a grandmother I never knew through the fragmented, often contradictory
narratives of people who knew her. In order to make this film, I embarked
on an often intense process of total immersion, moving to Bucharest for
seven months, and learning to speak Romanian. My filmic search for my
grandmother leads me from New York to Frankfurt to Israel, and finally
to Bucharest in search of witnesses (family members, neighbors, prison guards, cellmates) who can tell me their
memories of Monica Alfandary Sevianu. In my quest to uncover what really
happened, I encounter an overwhelming number of completely different versions
of the same story. I hear that the gangsters were part of an organized
Zionist movement, stealing money to help Romanian Jews. I hear that the
group planned to use the money to buy a plane and leave the country. I
hear that, crazy from disillusionment, the group of former romantic communists
plotted the robbery as a grandiose kamikaze-style act of political theater.
Ultimately, the contradictory and baroque stories that I collect about
the incident are far more interesting and revealing than any clear-cut
exposé, as each person I talk to tells me memories shaped by forty years of silence, distance, and struggle to construct a logical narrative around
an illogical act. 
The second journey is that of my mother, who immigrated to the US nearly thirty years ago, as she returns to Bucharest for the first time since leaving in her twenties, and tries to reconcile a city rendered nearly unrecognizable by urban decay with the Bucharest of her memories. My mother, who left Bucharest in 1970, remembers both Romania and her mother with an uneasy combination of bitterness and sentimentality. After the arrest of her parents, my mother was left alone to take care of her younger brother. Almost all of her relatives and family friends were arrested for questioning, and the few friends that were left in Bucharest, caught up in the general atmosphere of terror and paranoia bred by the mysterious political arrests of the Gheorghiu-Dej regime, refused to have anything to do with her. Understandably, my mother's memories of Romania are indelibly marked by the experience of being a political pariah, an "enemy of the people" who was asked to leave high school (enemies of the people, she was told, are not worth educating), an orphan at the age of fourteen. Only through my interest in making a film about Romania does my mother gradually begin to talk about these more painful childhood memories, and, when I decide to move to Romania for six months to finally see the country where my parents grew up, my mother decides that she will come and visit as well.
While Reconstruction begins as an intimate family story, it gradually expands into a more complex essay form incorporating and interpreting images from the old propaganda film Reconstituirea, as well as other propaganda images from communist Romania. Reconstruction uses the story of the bank hold-up and the production of the propaganda film as a point of departure for a 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. Through such archival images and interviews (including an interview with the cinematographer responsible for shooting Reconstituirea as well as other propaganda films of the 50's and 60's) Reconstruction raises questions about images, truth, and political theater that are at the heart of the film. Reconstruction opens with an excerpt from the archival film Reconstituirea: in the past, we are told, historians, who were all too often subjective and inaccurate, recorded history. Today, thanks to modern recording devices like the movie camera, reality is preserved intact: a reality that is absolute, objective, and beyond question. Reconstruction returns to this premise of cinema as truth throughout the film as it quotes the older archival film, undermines its assertion of historical veracity, and juxtaposes it with the contemporary retelling of history.
Reconstruction is both a family story spanning three generations, and, at the same time, a film that takes on larger issues, challenging notions of official histories and propaganda. It is both a personal meditation on the act of making a portrait of an absent protagonist, and a political meditation on the Eastern European communist experience. Ultimately, Reconstruction doesn't aspire to reach a final conclusion about the bank robbery, nor does it demystify the enigmatic persona of Monica Alfandary Sevianu. Rather, the film points to the impossibility of defining a single objective history, encouraging instead a kind of complex and ongoing process of examining and engaging with the past. As it juxtaposes past and present, contextualizing a historical gaze within a contemporary perspective, Reconstruction argues for an honest and informed investigation of Romania's troubled communist legacy.