One beautiful autumn morning, a man wakes up next to his wife. After taking out the garbage, he shaves and apparently prepares to go on a voyage, The two are having breakfast, without a word. The radio hums cheerful morning songs. A routine ritual. The man then leaves. He takes the elevator, waves at his wife after exiting the building, but he makes a turn, enters the building from the back entrance, takes the elevator and stops a few floors up from his apartment. His mistress opens him. The next morning, the ritual is almost the same....

When the Soviet Army marched into Romania in 1944, a part of the Romanian population went “into the mountains” – a diverse assortment of nationalists and fascists, liberals, apolitical farmers and members of the middle-class, who were affected by the Communists’ expropriations. Over a thousand armed resistance groups took refuge in the inaccessible forests of the Carpathian Mountains where they waited in vain for the support of the Western Allies. Thirty of them held their ground well into the 1950s. One was led by Ion Gavrilă-Ogoranu, who managed to remain undetected until 1976 when he was arrested. Constantin Popescu’s feature film depicts the daily existence of this group. With the strictness of protocol, it tells the story of a struggle that became an end in itself, as the enemy was constantly in pursuit and arrest meant torture and often liquidation. Hungry and emotionally withdrawn, the group of young men got entangled in a partisan war that could not be won, lost in the landscape of the South Carpathians, accompanied by a vigilant secret police, the Securitate. The everyday life of a hunt that was far from the heroism attributed to the glorified anti-communist resistance today. –Berlinale