This powerful portrait of press bravery must not be missed
Collective
Dir: Alexander Nanau. 109 mins ★★★★ ★
In 2015, the Colectiv nightclub in Bucharest was set on fire when pyrotechnics were illegally used indoors. Many of the 64 people – including four members of the metalcore band who were playing, Goodbye to Gravity – who lost their lives were killed by toxins released by the flammable acoustic foam installed by the club to boost sound quality.
Many other casualties, though, were burn victims who died later in hospital from bacterial infections that could have been prevented.
This fact, and the public health scandal it unleashed, might have been swept under the carpet, were it not for an investigation carried out by a most unlikely source – the sports daily Gazeta Sporturilor.
Under the leadership of a tenacious editor called Cătălin Tolontan, who had already exposed corruption in the football world and forced two sports ministers to resign, the Gazeta reporters asked difficult questions the Romanian authorities had a tough time answering.
The filmmaker Alexander Nanau quickly realised they were on to something big, and gained permission to follow their scoop as it exposed a bureaucratic cover-up going all the way to the top.
Secretly, the reporters monitored the manager of a firm called Hexi Pharma that supplied disinfectants to Romanian hospitals. It had been diluting active ingredients tenfold, bribing managers for silence, and divvying up the profits.
Nanau’s documentary about all
this, Collective, is sculpted with an eye on the conspiracy-thriller format of classic American films about journalism – think All The President’s Men or Spotlight.
But it’s anything but an easy watch, and doesn’t sex things up. It’s patient and sobering. Near the start, we see harrowing mobile phone footage from the moment the fire broke out, as the band’s frontman points out flames in the ceiling, and all hell breaks loose.
The dogged legwork of Tolontan and his colleagues pays off when they run gruesome photos of maggotinfested wounds, and whistle-blowers come out of the woodwork to bring the whole rotten pyramid crashing down.
It does sound epic – and its ramifications within Romania certainly were, in the short term. But Nanau’s focus is on the minutiae, the working methods of a few sleepdeprived hacks.
Tolontan was hailed as a hero by families of the victims, and all those taking to the streets to protest state corruption. But the film’s second half redirects its focus to the equally staunch figure of Vlad Voiculescu, a former patients’ rights activist who takes over as minister of health.
It’s he who must push through reform, getting to the bottom of practices designed to line the pockets of everyone in the health system before patients get a look-in. Nanau’s access to these backroom dealings is quite remarkable – Voiculescu simply said he had nothing to hide and wanted transparency for the record.
Much to his horror, the diluted chemicals are still being used under his watch, and his watch doesn’t last long.
Collective has an iron grasp on how a free press and the actions of government ought to function side by side, but it also gives us a despairing outlook on the vast extent of civic betrayal in Romania, and how fights like this merely chip away at the iceberg. It shouldn’t be missed. Available on Amazon, Apple TV, Curzon and other digital platforms from today