Great Communist Bank Robbery

In 1959 there was robbery at the Romanian National Bank in Bucharest. This was a peculiar occurrence since the local currency (the lei) could only be spent inside Romania, and bank robberies, along with most other kinds of crimes, were presumed not to happen in the socialist utopia.

The Romanian police scoured the country and ultimately arrested six people who they declared to be guilty. After confessing, the robbers agreed to re-enact their crime. An hour-long film was made in which they duly played themselves. There is some evidence that they thought by so doing they would be spared a death sentence. But after trial, also filmed, they were shot.

Alexandru Solomon’s film is both a bizarre recreation of a crime of which the motive is still difficult to fathom and an astonishing evocation of a lost world of Romanian Stalinism. —BBC Storyville