Reviews

Firestorm

Film: Collective

Director: Alexander Nanau

(Romania, 2019)

Journalist Cǎtǎlin Tolontan who revealed the corruption and appalling conditions that caused the deaths of Romanian hospital patients

CREDIT: (Collective) Alexander Nanau Production

A FIRE AT THE Bucharest nightclub Collectiv in 2015 killed 26 people, with a further 38 dying in hospital. The hospital deaths occurred as a result of bacterial infections caused by watered-down disinfectant, and led to the uncovering of corruption and malpractice that brought down the Romanian government.

It is a tragedy that deserves well-crafted and empathetic storytelling. Collective provides this but does not get stuck in an endless stream of grief and despair, with director Alexander Nanau electing not to focus too greatly on the heartbreak of the families.

Instead, Nanau manages to invoke another emotion – anger – and captivates his audience through following the teams of journalists working on the revelations that eventually brought down the government.

Anger is key to its story. For events such as the Colectiv fire, where justice is not given to families and victims, sadness is an underlying emotion. A lasting fury can exist as long as the injustice that fuels it does, and following the journalists who relentlessly work to break the shocking stories of corruption and greed that caused the deaths of 64 people show that rage manifested on screen.

Its hero and protagonist is journalist Cǎtǎlin Tolontan, the editor of a sports newspaper, while the newly appointed health minister Vlad Voiculescu gets to grips with the corruption in which the government is mired.

There is no commentary. Nanau could have been guilty of brash, in-your-face and overstated outrage, but the pain of the fire and the subsequent revelations were dragged out over many months, so a slow, chronological tale is chosen. Commentary is not needed when the journalists’ investigations tell the story so well.

The horrors of the injustice are carefully teased out. When sometimes the documentary threatens to be slow, the audience is suddenly jolted awake through cases of shocking inhumanity. Scenes of maggots living in the heads of the victims due to improper hospital treatment are sickening – but necessary. It is hard to imagine that this happened in a modern European country.

It is a well-produced and enthralling tale, and a unique film. But one thing is all too familiar.

As Tolontan says during the film: “When the press bows down to authorities, the authorities will mistreat the citizens.”

Bees and flies

Film: The Dissident

Director: Bryan Fogel

(USA 2020)

The fight for justice goes on for Hatice Cengiz, the fiancee of Jamal Khashoggi

CREDIT: (The Dissident) is on Amazon Prime Video in the UK and Ireland from 1 April 2021

THE CENTRAL EVENT of The Dissident – the brutal murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul in October 2018 – is one of the most horrifying political assassinations of the 21st century.

Khashoggi had become a thorn in the side of the Saudi regime, which was desperate to represent itself as modernising and reformist under the de facto leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Khashoggi, via a column for The Washington Post and direct activism with other dissidents, was undermining Saudi propaganda on a daily basis.

A year earlier, according to The New York Times, bin Salman had made it clear he was going after Khashoggi “with a bullet”.

The government of US president Joe Biden has now released a CIA report that concludes bin Salman personally ordered the murder.

The problem for Khashoggi, as Bryan Fogel’s documentary makes plain, was not so much that he was a dissident (although that was bad enough) but that he had once been a loyalist. Indeed, Khashoggi had spent many years acting as an informed and articulate voice for a moderate vision of Saudi reform: nuanced, at times critical but always arguing that the desert kingdom needed to reform from within at its own pace.

Everything changed for him during the Arab Spring of 2011 when he realised that people across the Arab world, especially the young, were impatient not for reform but for revolution.

The Dissident is an admirably clear and utterly necessary piece of filmmaking. It explains how 59-year-old Khashoggi had allied himself with the next generation to fight “the flies”, legions of online trolls employed to target bin Salman’s opponents. With Omar Abdulaziz, a young dissident video-blogger based in Canada, Khashoggi began to fight back with an online army of his own, known as “the bees”.

This film is also about Abdulaziz, who blames himself for the death of his friend and mentor. If Khashoggi had not yoked himself to the hopes and desires of the younger generation he would never have become the dissident of the film’s title and would probably be alive today.

Questions remain about why a man of such experience took the decision to enter the Saudi embassy that day. The answer is probably the simplest one: he was careless in desperation to obtain the paperwork to marry his 38-year-old Turkish fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, and forge the ultimate alliance with the younger generation.

Silencing abuse

Film: Athlete A

Directors: Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk

(USA, 2020)

American gymnast-turned-whistleblower Maggie Nichols, also known as ‘Athlete A’

CREDIT: Actual Films

THIS SHOCKING DOCUMENTARY uncovers the manipulative world of elite gymnastics in the USA. It documents the verbal, physical and sexual abuse of young girls who were following a dream to become the best in the world.

And it lays bare the lengths to which the governing body of the sport went to hide what was happening when those girls tried to get their voices heard.

It is uncomfortable viewing because it makes us confront the difficult truth that all of us who have enjoyed Olympic gymnastics were watching abuse in plain sight. We see footage of very young gymnasts wincing and then smiling painfully as they land on broken feet and cracked vertebrae and are then made to perform again on the same injuries. They were called names by coaches because of their weight.

These girls, the film alleges, were chosen not only because of their youth, talent and flexibility but because they were young enough to be easily controlled.

In the 1950s and 1960s, retired elite gymnast Jennifer Sey reminds us, grown women competed in gymnastics competitions, but that had all changed by the 1970s and was solidified in 1976 when 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comǎneci won the Olympic gold medal. Her coaches, Bela and Martha Karolyi, who had been part of dictator Nicolai Ceausescu’s system, then went to the USA and used the techniques they had perfected behind the Iron Curtain to train young American girls.

At the centre of the documentary is Larry Nassar, the team doctor who was the only person the girls trusted, who was kind to them and left them sweets on their pillows at training camp. He also sexually abused them.

One girl, Athlete A, Maggie Nichols, complained in 2015. She was dropped from the team and it took years for her to get justice. Eventually, as the film documents, hundreds of girls came forward to say the same happened to them, and Nassar was imprisoned.

Despite everything, little has really changed. At the end of the film, Steve Berta, the then investigations editor of the Indianapolis Star, which first broke the story, describes a situation where a girl was told by USA Gymnastics that if she continued to complain about her coach she would be off the team, regardless of her performance.

“That system is still in place today,” he says. “They are clinging to a process which has been used in the past to silence dissent.”