Two different views of the execution of Romanian wartime dictator Ion Antonescu confront one another. On one side is silent footage recorded in 1946 by cameraman Ovidiu Gologan, and on the other side are scenes from a biographical film shot five decades later by director Sergiu Nicolaescu.

The pendulum of ideology keeps on swinging in Radu Jude’s short, inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s dialectical montage. Interweaving first-hand footage with a fictional retelling of a famous execution, this visual séance of Romania’s past tackles cinema’s complicity in obscuring historical truths.