Romania, 1989. Communist regimes are crumbling across Europe. Seventeen-year-old Cristian Florescu dreams of becoming a writer, but Romanians aren’t free to dream; they are bound by rules and force.
Amidst the tyrannical dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu in a country governed by isolation and fear, Cristian is blackmailed by the secret police to become an informer. He’s left with only two choices: betray everyone and everything he loves—or use his position to creatively undermine the most notoriously evil dictator in Eastern Europe.
Cristian risks everything to unmask the truth behind the regime, give voice to fellow Romanians, and expose to the world what is happening in his country. He eagerly joins the revolution to fight for change when the time arrives. But what is the cost of freedom?
Master storyteller Ruta Sepetys is back with a historical thriller that examines the little-known history of a nation defined by silence, pain, and the unwavering conviction of the human spirit.

An utterly compelling, wickedly sharp narrative history of one of the strangest countries in Europe, by the bestselling author of Dictatorland.
The only country in Eastern Europe to speak a Latin language, Romania has always felt itself different, and its unique fate has been to experience some of the most disastrous leaderships of the last century. In the First World War her German king remained neutral until 1916. The interwar rulers form a gallery of bizarre characters and movements: the corrupt King Carol; the antisemitic Iron Guard led by Corneliu Codreanu; the vain general Ion Antonescu who seized power in 1940 and led the country into alliance with Nazi Germany. After 1945 power was handed over to Romania's tiny communist party, under whom it experienced severe repression, purges and collectivisation.
Then in 1964, Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power. And thus began the strangest dictatorship in recent European history.
Children of the Night is also a personal discovery of this extraordinary country, bringing together Paul Kenyon's eye for the private vices and kleptocratic tendencies of despots with a heartfelt exploration of the fate of one Romanian family in particular.

From the New York Times bestselling author Robert D. Kaplan, named one of the world’s Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, comes a riveting journey through one of Europe’s frontier countries—and a potent examination of the forces that will determine Europe’s fate in the postmodern age.

Robert Kaplan first visited Romania in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist and the country was a bleak Communist backwater. It was one of the darkest corners of Europe, but few Westerners were paying attention. What ensued was a lifelong obsession with a critical, often overlooked country—a country that, today, is key to understanding the current threat that Russia poses to Europe. In Europe’s Shadow is a vivid blend of memoir, travelogue, journalism, and history, a masterly work thirty years in the making—the story of a journalist coming of age, and a country struggling to do the same. Through the lens of one country, Kaplan examines larger questions of geography, imperialism, the role of fate in international relations, the Cold War, the Holocaust, and more.

Here Kaplan illuminates the fusion of the Latin West and the Greek East that created Romania, the country that gave rise to Ion Antonescu, Hitler’s chief foreign accomplice during World War II, and the country that was home to the most brutal strain of Communism under Nicolae Ceaușescu. Romania past and present are rendered in cinematic the ashen faces of citizens waiting in bread lines in Cold War–era Bucharest; the Bărăgan Steppe, laid bare by centuries of foreign invasion; the grim labor camps of the Black Sea Canal; the majestic Gothic church spires of Transylvania and Maramureş. Kaplan finds himself in dialogue with the great thinkers of the past, and with the Romanians of today, the philosophers, priests, and politicians—those who struggle to keep the flame of humanism alive in the era of a resurgent Russia.

Upon his return to Romania in 2013 and 2014, Kaplan found the country transformed yet again—now a traveler’s destination shaped by Western tastes, yet still emerging from the long shadows of Hitler and Stalin. In Europe’s Shadow is the story of an ideological and geographic frontier—and the book you must read in order to truly understand the crisis Europe faces, from Russia and from within.

Praise for In Europe’s Shadow

“[A] haunting yet ultimately optimistic examination of the human condition as found in Romania . . . Kaplan’s account of the centuries leading up to the most turbulent of all—the twentieth—is both sweeping and replete with alluring detail.” —Alison Smale,  The New York Times Book Review

“This book reveals the confident, poetical Kaplan . . . but also a reflective, political Kaplan, seeking at times to submerge his gift for romantic generalization in respectful attention to the ideas of others.” —Timothy Snyder, The Washington Post

“A serious yet impassioned survey of Romania . . . Kaplan is a regional geographer par excellence.” — The Christian Science Monitor

“Kaplan is one of America’s foremost writers on the region. . . . In a series of deep dives into the region’s past—Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg and Soviet—he finds parallels and echoes that help us understand the present.” — The Wall Street Journal

“Kaplan moves seamlessly from sights, sounds, and conversations to the resonance of history.” — Foreign Affairs

歴史はときとして、人々の想像を超えて進行します。1989年はベルリンの壁の崩壊、東西冷戦の終結など、ソビエト連邦主導のもとに社会主義国家であった東欧諸国が次々と民主化し世界の政治情勢が一変した年でした。東欧諸国の民主化革命の中、唯一、流血の事態となったルーマニアでの民主革命を記録した番組をお送りします。
1989年、東欧諸国で民主化が進む中、ルーマニアではニコラエ・チャウシェスクが独裁政権を維持しようとしていました。チャウシェスクは1965年に第一書記に就任。政敵を葬り、秘密警察と軍隊を用いて独裁体制を24年間にわたって続けていたのです。ルーマニアの民主革命は、ハンガリーとの国境に近い町ティミショアラで起きた反政府集会を制圧し、多数の死傷者を出したことに端を発しました。
番組はクリスマスを目前にしたルーマニアの首都ブカレストから始まった民主化革命を、二人のアマチュアカメラマンが命をかけて記録した映像を中心に、ルーマニアでの民主革命の全容をお伝えします。
【語り】
金内 吉男
【制作スタッフ】
○撮影： スピル・ゼレシュ／ダン・チョバヌ
○取材： 智片 通博／高橋 妙季
○編集： 今井 潤／高橋 明
○音響効果： 尾上 正幸
○技術： 小谷 公人／坪田 卓栄
○構成： 関藤 隆博／安井 浩志
○制作： 坂本 勝／北本 功

In communist Romania, thousands of Western films on bootleg VHS tapes — mostly Hollywood action movies — were smuggled behind the Iron Curtain, opening a window into the free world.
Under President Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania was culturally isolated and ideologically censored. Images of life outside its borders were cut off and TV was reduced to propaganda bulletins. From the drab concrete housing blocks to the food ration lines, the threat of surveillance prevented people from stepping out of line.
But in the mid-1980s, under the nose of the Securitate, Ceaușescu’s secret police, thousands of Hollywood films were smuggled into the country by an underground operative named Zamfir, and they were all covertly dubbed by Irina Nistor, a courageous translator whose distinct voice captivated the nation and became a symbol of freedom.
As we see through evocative re-creations in Chuck Norris vs Communism, a network of secret screening rooms sprung up across Romania as families, friends, and neighbors gathered to watch action heroes like Norris, Van Damme, and Stallone, along with romantic comedies, dramas, and Hollywood epics. While the stories captured the imagination, it was the lavish settings and backdrops that mesmerized the audience. The films offered Romanians glimpses of the abundant West, which prompted the regime to clamp down on the clandestine screenings, casting an atmosphere of ever-present danger and suspicion.

畫面來自攝影師哥斯提卡厄辛特的照相館，是羅馬尼亞小鎮攝於1937 至1946 年間的珍貴照片。聲音則來自一名猶太裔醫生同期的日記，記下當年反猶太主義抬頭， 羅馬尼亞的大屠殺歷史，並穿插那時候的政府宣傳片聲帶。雷杜祖迪繼《押奴記》（39 屆）及《少年詩人的心疤》 （41 屆）後，轉拍非劇情片，同樣充滿震憾力。聲音與畫面，明明出自同一時空，卻彷彿兩個平行宇宙，猶太人面對的苦難命運，與羅馬尼亞小鎮的生活面貌，看似割裂分離，卻又互相對照，彼此補足。

"After all, a dictator is simply an artist who is able to fully put into practice his egotism. It is a mere question of aesthetic level, whether he turns out to be Baudelaire or Bolintineanu, Louis XVI or Nicolae Ceausescu." Andrei Ujica. From a formal point of view, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu proves that it is possible to only use existing images to yield films focused on recent history, yet with an epic vein similar to that of the historical fiction cinema - such as, most notably, the ample period pieces dedicated by American cinema to the Vietnam War generation. This is an eminently syntactic endeavor, where montage plays a twofold part: mise-en-scene, as it builds scenes that do not exist as such in the rushes, and classical editing, connecting scenes together. We may be witnessing the birth of a new film genre.