Red Gloves

Q&A with Radu Gabrea!

In 1957, one year after the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, the Communist regime in Romania was determined to quash any attempt to imitate the events from the neighboring country. In Transylvania, where news of the events had spread, the Securitate unleashed a particularly extensive campaign of arrests and trials. One of the victims was Felix Goldschmidt, a young Saxon writer pressured to incriminate his literary colleagues during months of intense interrogation and psychological torture. Radu Gabrea’s unsettling adaptation of Eginald Schlattner’s novel dares to confront the “obsessive decade” (as the ’50s were dubbed in Romania) in all its disturbing complexity. Conceived as a claustrophobic chamber piece, this is the movie of a tragic guilt that goes all the way in its exploration of the limits of an individual (newcomer Alex Mihaescu, excellent) caught in the vise of a repressive system.