Collective: Searing Doc Chronicles Corruption Exposed by Tragedy and the Journos Who Followed It

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

Romanian director Alexander Nanau’s investigative documentary Collective is one of those brutally truthful accounts that makes you question human nature itself. While the story is Romanian and specific, the balance of private wealth versus public welfare is a subject on everyone’s minds these days.

The story revolves around a fire that occurred on October 30, 2015 at the Collectiv rock club in Bucharest. It left 27 dead and more than 180 injured. A few minutes into the film, after we’ve learned the basic facts, we unexpectedly cut to cell phone footage of the actual event.

The band onstage, Goodbye To Gravity, has just finished a punk-metal song chastising official corruption. After finishing the song, the lead singer points to sparks from onstage pyrotechnics that had started a fire on the foam ceiling. This isn’t part of the show, he tells the crowd, and asks for a fire extinguisher. People begin running and screaming. The band leader survived after severe burns. Four of the other musicians died.

The initial event, caused by improper building materials and a lack of fire exits, was horrifying. The ensuing medical scandal involves a degree of callousness that is hard to comprehend.

In the weeks after the fire, another 38 people died in hospital, some because of inadequate treatment and bacterial infections. In the days after the fire, hospital administrators and politicians insisted against all evidence that the patients’ treatment was sufficient, that there were no systemic problems, and no need to transfer to patients to better facilities in Vienna. But by November 4, the social anger was too great to deny and the government resigned.

Filmmaker Nanau and his film crew began following the growing scandal early on, by attaching themselves to Cătălin Tolontan, the editor of a sports newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor, who we see at press conferences, challenging Minister of Health Nicolae Baniciouiu, who insisted that everything was under control.

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Tolontan and his team soon started finding bizarre evidence of the extent of corruption in the medical system. The reporters traced the antibacterial liquids to Hexi Pharma and its owner Dan Condrea, who sold diluted solutions to the hospitals (and to Romanian troops in Afghanistan). The hospitals diluted the disinfectants further. Patients continued to get worse infections in the burn wards.

More scandals were unveiled. One whistleblower doctor had passed on evidence of corruption to state intelligent services, but the files abruptly went missing. A whistleblower’s videos show maggots crawling on an unbathed patients’ seared flesh. The day before he was to be questioned for fraud, drug executive Condrea crashed his car into a tree and died.

In the short term, the protests brought positive results. When the Social Democrat government resigned, a new Minister of Health, a young patients’ rights advocate Vlad Voiculescu, was put in charge. Consistent with his philosophy of transparency, he allowed the film crew to follow his every phone call and interaction with the political-medical establishment.

We listen to threatening and pleading phone calls and watch as the mayor of Bucharest attacks and slanders him on television as unpatriotic. Further corruption is revealed, including hospital managers and doctors who siphon money out of the health system to offshore accounts and foreign clinics.

There’s a subplot involving a young woman named Tedy Ursuleanu, a young architect who was severely scarred and disfigured the night of the fire. She posed for a photographic art show and became a symbol of the tragedy. The health minister eventually meets her and speaks, remarkably frankly, about the corruption that destroys lives. But this was far from a photo op. Long before, we see a poster of her on the wall of his office.

It would be a great Hollywood ending if reforms were made, victims were compensated, and the country grieved, but that’s not what happened. After a year out of office, on a populist platform that included no taxes for medical personnel, the Social Democrats were swept back into office with a record majority.

If the film questions your faith in human nature, it certainly reasserts the power of old-fashioned cinema verité journalism. Nanau’s approach is rigorously observational, without any direct interviews with subjects. The film took 14 months to shoot, another 18 to edit.

Granted a rare degree of access to reporters, and later to the Minister of Health, Collective is a tribute to people who work together to uncover the truth, even if the immediate benefits are not obvious.

Collective. Directed by Alexander Nanau. Available beginning November 20 on the Apple TV app.