Word: bucharest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2001-2001
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Reconstruction hinges on an account of the “Ioanid Gang” bank heist of 1959, in which six prominent Jewish intellectuals robbed an armored car with over one million lei on its way to a branch of the Romanian National Bank in Bucharest. The title refers to a propaganda film made by the Romanian Communist Party in 1961 entitled Reconstituirea (Re-Enactment), which was a literal re-enactment of the bank heist using the actual robbers, who by then had been condemned to death by the government. Two of these six were Lusztig’s grandmother...
...project. “My mother had found it very uninteresting, but to me as a filmmaker it seemed more than relevant,” she commented. Armed with a whetted curiosity surrounding the intentions of her grandmother, Lusztig decided to learn Romanian and spend nearly a year in Bucharest, digging into secret police files on the highly controversial case, and even gaining access to the original propaganda film due to her relationship to Sevianu...
...Lusztig didn’t see this as a barrier for her to cross, but rather another feature of a country still confused with its own identity. In the film, which is narrated entirely in the first-person by Lusztig, she describes her visit to Bucharest as eliciting a “phantom nostalgia,” a sense of longing for what had once been a charming cosmopolitan city, the “Paris of the East,” until it was demolished during the last Communist regime in Romania. One rather humorous comment in the film from...
...foot-and-mouth and a host of unpalatable soy substitutes have left Type A red-meat lovers forlorn in the produce aisle, desperately trying to assemble a meal from legumes and kasha. Now, resourceful amateur butchers around the globe are proffering alternatives to the traditional Sunday roast. In Bucharest last week, public authorities plastered the city with posters telling consumers how to spot the difference between a leg of lamb and a leg of dog. (Check for paws...
...with the promise of escape, the traffickers can capitalize on more lenient visa requirements and lax law enforcement. Profits are considerable. The initial investment may be small-a few hundred dollars for dental work, new clothes and a plane ticket-but the payoff is upwards of $1,000 in Bucharest and $5,000 in Rome, plus prostitution profits generated along the way. The beauty of the trade, as one investigator puts it, lies in the fact that the victims can be sold and resold, producing income almost indefinitely. "It's better than mutual funds," quips the official. The iom figures...