Poor building standards led to deadly consequences after fire broke out in a Romanian nightclub; poor hospital standards led to more deaths afterwards. A sports newspaper, bizarrely, broke the scandal. The first part of this documentary mostly follows the journalists and in truth, it's a little dull; people speak to them and they publish what they're told, but it's not very dramatic unless you know the background story. Things become more interesting when we get to follow a new, reformist Minister of Health. His problem is that his entire bureaucracy is corrupt; and sadly, in a land where the young have given up on politics, his war on them is doomed. It's this part of the film which is most gripping, sad, and necessary. It sometimes seems that Europe (and the rest of the world) is perpetually poised on the brink of rolling back progress; for those in Romania, it seems there is very something rotten in the state that even tragedy cannot remove.
Review of Collective
