Since the meeting with Francisc Ford Copolla (in 2007) I have never seen so much pasture, rigor in documentation, attention to details, enthusiasm and emotion well controlled by the authority of the consciousness of one's own value in a director. A MAN and a Genius (I own the terms) whom I had the chance to meet in Suceava, along with the screening of her film about the Pitesti experiment that began (the climax), in Suceava.
The public still knows very little about the terrible Pitesti Experiment, in which some political prisoners were turned against others and the latter went through unimaginable tortures. Books and studies were written, but it was not enough. To fill this gap, 12 years ago, a very young director, Victoria Baltag, started an ambitious project, without any funding.
In 2015, he managed to make an artistic film without a budget, in which the late great actor Ion Caramitru also participated, in what would be his last role in a feature film.
From then until now, the director and her team of volunteers went with the film on a national tour, in 44 places, but she was also invited to Mexico, Canada and the USA. Every time he presented in an exhibition the objects he managed to collect: three paintings made by the prisoner Fag Negrescu after he managed to survive the inferno in Pitesti, numerous other paintings donated by contemporary artists because from the money obtained in following their sale to be able to help the project, works of art by the director, photos and objects from the filming, a necklace donated to Iasi by the journalist Lucian Merisca, the son of Constantin Merisca, a former political prisoner in Pitesti.
At the end of August, the first edition of the tournament ended in Bucharest, for a little while because the second tournament of 2023 is going to start this fall and has at its center objects of the young people who went through the Pitesti Experiment.
