The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica, 2010)

9/10
2010's Senna was a much-lauded documentary assembled entirely from archival footage to form a complete portrait of one man. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu uses the same means to accomplish a different end. The film opens on Ceausescu's last day, white-haired and disheveled, being interrogated in a dingy court room like a common criminal for his crimes against humanity. The film then goes back, taking us through Ceausescu's ascension to power and his communist dictatorship that lasted from 1965 to 1989. Rather than using a typical "how did we get here" narrative, the movie is assembled from Romanian propagandist films - so for 3 hours we're inundated with footage of Ceausescu at parades, touring building sites and bakeries, entertaining political figures from Nixon to Gorbachev, giving intense speeches vowing to stamp out capitalism...this is Ceausescu's Romania as Ceausescu would have it, hence the "auto"biography of the title. In the end, the movie almost seems like Ceaucescu's defense to the questions barked at him in the court room in those opening 2 minutes, hideously skewed and self-righteous to the end.
I'm no political fanatic but I found the film massively engrossing, and director Andrei Ujica's approach extremely novel. With both this and Senna coming out in the same year, I hope this means a revival of films assembled entirely from archival footage, because both of these had an enormous impact on me.