Márta Mészáros – Sa zîmbeasca toti copii AKA Let All the Children Smile (1959)

From the DVD booklet:
Our town… is big! Maybe that’s why it has room for so many stories and events, for so many problems. Probably you’d like us to tell you a story, maybe even a love story. No. Today we’ll talk about a problem. In fact, it’s still a problem of the heart…but a problem to do with children. This is the start of a film made by Márta Mészáros during the few years she spent in Romania at the Sahia studio. The warmth of the beginning is unexpected for a film produced during one of Romania’s darkest decades. The film’s protagonists are orphans taken into care by the state and accommodated at a children’s home in Bucharest. Mészáros’s interest in the fate of children orphaned in the aftermath of the Second World War was autobiographic: as she had lost her parents as a child herself, she had first-hand experience of growing up without them. At the same time, during the 1950s, the trope of the orphan adopted by the parent-state was deeply political, and therefore relevant to the state’s agenda – and this was one of the reasons why the project was readily accepted for production. Although the film ticks a few boxes relating to the politics of the time – such as the socialist regime’s investment in human capital and the opposition between ‘old’ and ‘new’ – it is much more than a purely political exercise. Mészáros`s orphans are first and foremost human beings and are political subjects only secondarily. p They have their own names and biographies, and also their own traumas, among which poverty and domestic violence are prevalent. Nonetheless, the film is not only about the horrors of the past, but also about the light of the present, and the hope that that present brings with it. As it was produced at a time when regulations at Sahia were not so strict when it came to the length of films, Let All the Children Smile is longer than the studio’s usual ten-minute productions. Therefore, the film has enough time to sketch the process of recovery and rediscovery undergone by the children in state care. An essential contribution to the coherence of the film is provided by two of Mészáros’ collaborators: Doru Segall, newly returned to Romania after having studied at VGIK in Moscow, and writer Eva Sîrbu, here in her second collaboration with Sahia, after Report from the Red Flag (Alexandru Sîrbu, 1956, see VINTAGE SAHIA I), and whose voice-over commentary is the perfect fit for Mészáros’s gracious, humane approach.

Sa zambeasca toti copiii (1957) Marta Meszaros.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	17 min 19 s
Size: 	309 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	574x576 ~> 816x576
Aspect ratio:  	1.417
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 300 kb/s
BPP: 	0.290
Audio
#1:  	Romanian 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/E6CFF12B22145E2/Sa_zimbeasca_toti_copii_(1957)_Marta_Meszaros.mkv

Language(s):Romanian
Subtitles:English