"The Dead Nation" is a documentary-essay, which shows a stunning collection of photographs from a Romanian small town in the 1930's and 1940's. The soundtrack, composed mostly from excerpts taken from the diary of a Jewish doctor from the same era, shows us what the photographs do not: the rising of the anti-Semitism and eventually a harrowing depiction of the Romanian Holocaust, a topic which is not very talked about in the contemporary Romanian society.—Radu Jude
A film constructed using the opposition of what a huge collection of recently discovered glass-plate photographs from the 30's and 40's tell us about Romania and what they do not show.