Metronom

Bucharest, 1972. Ceauşescu’s communist regime is strangling society. Freedom is under pressure and all cultural actors must serve the propaganda machine of the state. It is against this backdrop that timid teenager Ana is told by her boyfriend that he is going to flee the country. Later that night she parties with friends. They listen to the banned radio station Radio Free Europe, they dance to "Light My Fire" by the Doors and decide to write a letter to the radio host. Until the Securitate, the secret state police, stops the party. What began as research for a documentary about young people in 1970s Romania evolved into Alexandru Belc's fiction debut, which in turn transforms from a story about first love into a haunting portrait of rebellion, of sexual and political awakening and the uncertainties of life under totalitarianism.

"A Romanian teenager learns a hard lesson in the state's power to intervene in private affairs in Alexandru Belc's handsome, heartfelt debut. (...) An intelligent, invested homage to a doomed Romanian generation, robbed of the freedoms of adulthood before they'd even got to sample them." - Variety