Lucia Hossu Longin started in 1991 a documentary series called "The Memorial of Suffering" about persecution in communist Romania . It tells the stories of political prisons, the labor camp system, of anti-communist resistance and the secret police. The total footage consists of more than 150.000 minutes of video documenting decades of repression and terror. It was aired by the Romanian Television until May 2004, when it was interrupted, as it approached the last decade of Ceausescu's dictatorship. At the request of the civil society, the Romanian Television approved in November 2005 the airing of a new series subtitled "A History You Don't Learn in School". The "Memorial of Suffering" consists until now of more than 120 episodes and was aquired by the Paris Videoteque, the Hoover Archives, and the Library of Congress. The series were seminal in establishing the Sighet Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance.
The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York has invited Lucia Hossu Longin to join us in a dialogue with Corina Suteu, director of RCINY, about the making of this shocking visual archive of recent Romanian history. The discussion will follow the way she chose to deal with the communist memory, the dangers of her work - from censorship to death treaths -, and the outcomes of such an ambitious project. Selections from the TV series will be projected in the RCINY Auditorium to illustrate the dialogue.
Historian Stejarel Olaru, Lucia Hossu Longin and their television crew will be in New York , Washington and Chicago to shoot a documentary about the strange death of Professor Ioan Petru Culianu, the renowned historian of religion, culture, and ideas. The film is produced by the Romanian Television and the Institute for Investigation of the Communist Crimes in Romania .
FREE ADMISSION. RSVP icrny@icrny.org, 212-687-0180 .
