Radiating angry testosterone, an aggressive metal band threatened to bring down the rafters of Colectiv, a Romanian rock club. It’s October 2015, Bucharest, and someone in the audience is recording the show with a cellphone camera. “All of our hopes were hanged in the gallows” the vocalist bellows—in Romanian—just before the ceiling above the stage starts on fire. “Is there an extinguisher?” the puzzled front man asks, but within seconds he and his mates are scrambling for the exits—except there is only one exit, the front door.
The ceiling dissolves into fiery splinters, followed by screams, jostling, trampling—cut to black. The chaos recorded on someone’s cellphone is the incident behind the documentary Collective.
Nominated for two Academy Awards, Best Documentary and International Feature, Collective is about what happened to the clubgoers and the fire that threatened to bring down a government thanks to an investigative series in an independent newspaper. Twenty-seven died that night in the fire, but 37 more burn victims died in a hospital in weeks to come. The government issued “condolences” (no “thoughts and prayers” jive) and claimed that “all medical needs are being met” for the casualties. But wait—the low survival rate signaled that something had gone wrong and, turns out, it wasn’t isolated malpractice.
Editor Catalin Tolaton and his team from the alternative Gazeta newspaper decide to investigate. Their quest to sift unhappy truths from pleasant official falsehoods was recorded on camera at every step for Collective by Romanian director Alexander Nanau. Their reporting begins when sources inside the hospital and Romania’s pharmaceutical corporation tell the Gazeta that the burn victims died from infections left untreated due to deliberately diluted drugs. As the Gazeta’s investigation continues, Romanian television news picks up the headlines and street demonstrations heat-up. “Healthcare for all, not just for mobsters!” the protestors shout, adding just one word for their government, “Resign!”
The Gazeta’s reporters educate themselves on medicine, chemistry and international finance as they trace the diluted drug scam to offshore banks and corporations linked to a network of bribery that enmeshed hospital administrators across the country. At least some members of the government had known about this for years. When the public prosecutor opens an investigation, the pharma CEO dies in a mysterious car crash.
Collective is a reminder of the responsibility of the press and the necessity of paid professionals with enough time and resources to lift up the rocks and expose what’s crawling beneath. Journalism isn’t just editorializing. In composing Collective from the footage he collected, the director never falls back on American documentary cliches—there are no tinkling piano keys to signify sadness or synthesized fanfares to mark triumph. The power of the story carries the film. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end happily, but the message as expressed by Tolaton remains true and universal. “When the press bows down to authority,” he says, “the authority will mistreat its citizens.”
