Summaries

Summary (cinéma du réel 2012)
“It was normal: Ceausescu, the RCP, we lived with it, why talk about it?”. When Vanina Vignal met Ioana in Romania in 1991, the dictator had fallen but the two friends still avoided politics. AFTER THE SILENCE is constantly battling against the silence transmitted from generation to generation in her friend’s family – and the whole country. Armed with a dictionary, her fluent Romanian and an intimate knowledge of the family, the filmmaker shows rare determination in an established documentary genre – the evocation of the abuses of a dictatorship – that sometimes goes no further than gathering testimonies. For the sake of their friendship, she asks questions relentlessly, digging into a half-revealed family secret and testing the small private world that Ioana has retreated into. And the more the conversation progresses, the more her Romanian friend details the strategy she developed during the dictatorship in order to avoid politics. This survival-driven apolitical attitude soon reveals itself as what fuels the system, which is only too happy that brains disconnect of their own free will. Charlotte Garson, cinéma du réel 2012
Short summary (cinéma du réel 2012)
Twenty years ago, the filmmaker struck up a friendship with Ioana in Romania. She returns to ask her about family silences. Together, they analyse a powerful and despotic mechanism : the perpetuation of denial.
Short statement (Vanina Vignal)
How do we carry on living, afterwards.
When we’ve grown up under a dictatorship, when we shaped our lives under a dictatorship. When it’s part of us.
Short summary (Vanina Vignal)
AFTER THE SILENCE deals with how the effects of dictatorship are still extremely vivid, even after the fall of dictatorship. It is a film about the abuses of the state, about fear, about how silence is passed on from one generation to the next.
Summary (Vanina Vignal)
AFTER THE SILENCE deals with how the effects of dictatorship are still extremely vivid, even after the fall of dictatorship. It is a film about the abuses of the state, about fear, how silence is passed on from one generation to the next. A film about the space which, despite all that is known, is left to ghosts that make it impossible to live fully in the present. Three generations walled in silence. The legacy of denial, as nothing has been put back in its place and nothing has been said. Killing the dictator is not enough to kill the dictatorship.